Empirical evidence from Europe proves that Inventor Ownership maximizes tech transfer by increasing spin-off creation and quick diffusion of knowledge

[Christos and Merle, “University ownership and information about the entrepreneurial opportunity in commercialisation: a systematic review and realist synthesis of the literature,” The Journal of Technology Transfer volume 46, 01/04/2020, p. 1487–1513, Springer, accessed 07/17/2024, BKM GDI]

This empirical subsection addresses the third research question about how the roles and rights of actors influence information conditions regarding the entrepreneurial opportunity. The issue of the prevailing property rights features prominently in the university commercialisation literature, and revolves around three competing regimes. University ownership constitutes the dominant property rights regime in the US and most of Europe (Grimaldi et al. 2011). Within this context, the university is conferred with rights upon the research outcomes produced by academics through public funding, and undertakes the task of promoting this to users who can adopt it for the purposes of introducing innovation. Concerns about the ability of this regime to deliver optimal solutions, as described in the introductory section of our paper, prompted the advancement of two correctives. The first, advanced by Ayres and Ouellette (2017) proposes a ‘market test’ for university inventions, whereby, before charging licensing fees universities would be required to find out whether enterprises would be willing to commercialise the invention in return for a nonexclusive license with a nominal fee. This would, according to the authors, be particularly useful in advancing commercialisation when there are multiple users interested in university held IP, and reduce aggressive litigious behaviour by universities. A different corrective is advanced by Lee (2012) who argues that increased integration, though a plethora of formal and informal linkages, is an essential complement to university ownership on account of the tacit element of the IP involved. An altogether different, and competing, to university ownership property rights regime involves inventor ownership. This regime that was present in a number of European countries, such as Denmark, Sweden, and Italy places the actor who is most (technically) knowledgeable about the research outcome in the position of deciding the approach to commercialisation (Kenney and Patton 2009). This is viewed as a means of strengthening academic entrepreneurship and decentralising knowledge transfer, facilitating effective and quick diffusion and maximizing innovation and development outputs (Kenney and Patton 2011). Inventor ownership has been found to have a positive impact on generating spinoffs rather than on licensing (Damsgaard and Thursby 2013; Kenney and Patton 2011).