No conclusive evidence inventor ownership on the value of patent
Ouellette, Senior Fellow Stanford Law School & Tutt, Counsel Arnold & Porter, 19
[Lisa & Andrew, 12-25-19, Elsevier, “How do patent incentives affect university researchers?,” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818819302522?via%3Dihub, 7-18-24, GDI – Tom Huynh]
Finally, in our study, the value of the patent, measured in a couple of ways, is not found to be related to university-ownership of the patent, which indicates that both the university and inventors do not discriminate between patents according to their expected value. This finding contradicts most of the studies on this effect but is in line with . One interviewee told that the university-owned patent that she filed was the least valuable one, and the more valuable ones were filed with her own company. Yet, there is not such a pattern in the patents analyzed for this study, or the pattern is too weak to find a significant result in our sample. An explanation might be that, at least in the years before and around the founding of the TTO, both academic inventors and the TTO might not have had experience in discerning patent value and making decisions based on such a value assessment. Studies that explore the effect of TTO in later years, or involve more universities, can further explore this issue.