| The involvement of industry, academia and government and their interactions have become of great importance for innovation development in both nanotechnology and biotechnology. Keeping this in mind, using funding data provided by the Système d'information sur la recherche universitaire (SIRU) and patenting data extracted from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), our study evaluates the importance of private and public funding of university researchers for innovation. We find that awarded funds, whether they are of a public or private origin, do not have much of an effect on subsequent patenting. Furthermore, since the innovation model used in biotechnology is often taken as a reference for efficient innovation in nanotechnology, we compile comparison statistics of various metrics to verify their similarity. Some of the compiled measures include: time intervals between patent application and granting, the number of researchers per patent, the average financial investment per researcher, the number of claims associated to each patent, the number of forward citations, the degree of application, etc. This enables us to see that despite their similarities, nanotechnology and biotechnology do not have as much in common as one might think. Moreover our results suggest contradictory findings as far as quality indicators are concerned, underlining a potential unreliability of one or the other. We conduct an econometric analysis to evaluate the impact of funding on university researcher patenting and to obtain better insight into this divergence of patent quality indicators. In doing this, we also take into account the researcher's position in the academic network, university affiliations and other personal characteristics. We find that certain factors increase innovation output of university researchers in nanotechnology, while others are more useful for innovation in biotechnology. Also the quality of a patent as defined by its claims depends on certain key points that differ from the quality associated with its citation rate. |
