Federal and Industrial Funded Research Expenditures and University Technology Transfer Licensing

Abstract

I relate the numbers of university licenses and options to both university research characteristics and research expenditures from federal government or the industry. I use the polynomial distributed lag model for unbalanced panel data to estimate the effects of research expenditures from different sources on licensing activity. I find evidences suggesting both federal and industrial funded research expenditures take 2-3 years from lab to licenses while federal expenditures have higher long-term dynamic effect on number of licenses. Breaking down licenses by different types of partners, I find that federal expenditures have highest effect with small companies while industrial-funded expenditures have higher effect in licenses with large companies and licenses yielding large income. Further research is necessary to analyze the reason for such differences between the effects of research expenditures on licensing activity.