The commercialization of university technology: Implications for firm strategy and public polic

Since the 1980s, several trends have increased the importance of licensing and patenting and the commercialization of university-invented technologies: the enactment of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which facilitated patenting and licensing by universities; increased commercial interest in biotechnology, a technical field in which university research capabilities are particularly strong; and the general strengthening of US intellectual property rights in the 1980s. This dissertation presents three related studies that examine important dimensions of U.S. university patenting and licensing, (1) how the characteristics of firms influence their decisions to license university technologies and their management of this uncertain process, (2) the geographic diffusion of university technology through knowledge spillovers and market-based licensing transactions, and (3) the effect of the Bayh-Dole Act on the research and technology marketing activities by universities.;In the first study, I develop two simple models that predict the likelihood that a firm will license a university technology and whether the firm will purchase an "option" agreement to manage the technological uncertainty of the commercialization process. I empirically test predictions generated by these models using detailed data on exclusive licenses of patented inventions at the University of California, the largest university licensor in the U.S.;In the second study, I examine the differential geographic "reach" of market and non-market channels of university technology commercialization. The findings presented in this study contradict earlier conclusions regarding the relative importance of geography for knowledge spillovers and market-based transactions in technology transfer.;In the third study, I investigate the effect of commercialization incentives created by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 on the research and technology marketing efforts of three leading university licensors, and augment this analysis with large-scale empirical examination of the effect by Bayh-Dole on the "quality" of U.S. university patenting. The findings suggest that the decline in the quality of U.S. university patents observed after Bayh-Dole appears to be due to the Act's encouragement of new universities into technology transfer, rather than a change in the research incentives of universities, as widely feared by policymakers and other interested observers.