Essays on technology transfer and diffusion
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Keywords
Academic patents ; Technology transfer ; Individual inventors ; Market potentials ; Economic growth ; Policy making ; Technological innovationsAbstract
Economic growth is driven by innovation activity carried out locally as well as by the ability
of a region to learn from external technological achievements. Technological inventions have
become the most important source of growth. Producing new knowledge, however, is not
cheap and highly concentrated in few countries or in some regions within the same country.
The present thesis studies the transfer of the patented technological knowledge to the market
and across space.
Specifically, it studies the propensity and time length of the transferring rights of university
and individual inventors patents to the market. The novelty lies in exploiting a particular
feature of the patent system that ables one to infer the time of commercialisation of the
patented technology. The aim is to offer to the science and technology policymakers an
unbiased evidenced-based analysis of an extensive corpus of more than 20,000 university
and 197,000 inventors’ patents granted over their entire enforceable life. With this approach,
also important issues can be studied such as characteristics of transferred patents, propensity
and timing of licensing of federally funded academic patents compared to their counterparts
and differences in licensing outcomes for the different funding institutions, which have not
been adequately addressed so far in the literature. Furthermore,it is also examined whether
federally funded patents differ from the non federally funded in the propensity and time
length required for commercialization.
Additionally, the thesis also considers technology transfer via the mobility of high skilled
individuals across space, that of patent inventors. The latter, have a significant economic
contribution: they are deeply involved in the production of innovation, which in turn is the
main driver of economic growth and well-being and are also important vehicle of knowledge
transmission - when skilled workers move from place to place, their knowledge and skills
move as well. The contribution of knowledge flows on the shape of the geographical
distribution of innovative and economic activities and consequently on inequality among
regions and countries has motivated scholars to document them and study their boundaries.
The inventor moves are tracked by relying on patent data. A gravity model is used to
examine whether proximity, namely geographic, technological, economic, and cultural
between countries and country level factors shape the flows of these talented individuals. As a comparison, in the same framework, also the flows of simple, less skilled migrants are
analysed. The contribution of this essay lies in using one simple common framework to
comprehensively analyse the determinants - and particularly the various types of proximities
- for both highly and less skilled individuals and further assess the role of these two groups of
migrants on local innovation activity.
Overall, the empirical analysis of technology transfer to the market and around the world
undertaken in the present thesis, offers useful and novel insights to important policy issues
surrounding technology transfer of university and individual inventors’ patents which are
also relevant beyond US borders as a number of European countries consider or have already
adopted policies to facilitate the efficient transfer of technologies to the marketplace. Further,
by studying the mobility of patent inventors, important factors that make a region an attractor
of talented individuals can be identified and relevant policies can be suggested into that
direction.
Department
Σχολή Οικονομικών, Επιχειρηματικών και Διεθνών Σπουδών. Τμήμα Οικονομικής ΕπιστήμηςNumber of pages
138Language
EnglishCollections
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Διεθνές
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Διεθνές