Does context influence knowledge transfer? The influence of experience and institutional aspects of patent systems on the licensing of inventions

Prior research on transfer of knowledge across organizations has focused to a great degree on the traits of the knowledge itself or of the organizations involved in the transfer. I argue in this dissertation that the context in which the interorganizational knowledge transfer takes place can affect whether the transfer occurs. I study the contextual effects of various national patent systems by using a data set of inventions from a large university which were patented in one or more of 30 different countries from 1971 through June of 1995. I use an event history methodology to study the likelihood that any of the 874 cases of patented technology licensed in any country. 254 cases were licensed during the study.; I propose three hypotheses: First, that greater numbers of skilled patent firms will lead to higher licensing chances. Next, I propose that greater amounts of collective national experience with patenting will lead to a higher likelihood that patented inventions are licensed. Finally, I propose that specific collective experience as members of three international Patent agreements will lead to a greater likelihood of licensing.; There was strong support that the longer a country was a member of two patent treaty organizations, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Patent Cooperation Treaty, led to increased licensing. This years of membership effect was separate from the effect of a country simply being a member of the treaty or not. This provides strong evidence of a learning process in the patent/licensing infrastructure that elaborates over time. General experience in patenting as measured by cumulative counts of patents granted was important in modeling licensing chances but was not significant once the more specific experience variables of years of membership in the patent treaties entered the equation. These findings provide insight into collective learning (Ingram and Baum, 1997; Greve, 1999) and serves in part to bridge the gap between the trait-based, organization focused learning literature and the macro-economic national innovation literature (Nelson, 1993).