@article{d5325446178d433c9bb1766a4d902799,
title = "Government funding of university-industry collaboration: exploring the impact of targeted funding on university patent activity",
abstract = "With innovation as a third mission of universities, governments around the world have competitive funding schemes to support university-industry collaboration. Little is known about the effectiveness of these schemes compared to traditional competitive funding programs in increasing commercially valuable research outputs from universities. We explore whether university-industry targeted schemes are more effective by comparing two Australian funding programs that share the processes of how funds are awarded—one with a requirement of university-industry collaboration, the other traditional, not requiring collaboration. We use patenting activity as our measure of commercially valuable research outputs. We find that university inventors awarded university-industry targeted grants have greater patent activity compared to those awarded non-targeted grants. Analysing the dynamics, we find the effect is rather short lived, with an increase in patent activity in the year of award of grant not persisting in subsequent years. We find a similar effect on a university level. We also find that the number of new patent applications, but not patents granted, is greatest when universities achieve a mix of both types of funding.",
keywords = "Grants, Patent, Research funding, University-industry collaboration",
author = "Annita Nugent and Chan, {Ho Fai} and Uwe Dulleck",
note = "Funding Information: Governments subsidize university collaboration with industry through a plethora of schemes, with funding being injected into both universities and firms to support joint research. For example, the US NSF GOALI program awards funding to academic units (Martin-Vega et al., ) while firms are the recipient of US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding (Ford et al., ), and in the case of the European Community{\textquoteright}s Framework Programme, project funding can be awarded to either firms or universities (Sz{\"u}cs, ). Previous studies have investigated the impact of public funding targeting university-industry collaboration, predominantly the focus has been on the effect on industry innovation. Funding Information: We acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council (DP180103856; DP180101169). We are grateful to Henri Burgers, Benno Torgler and Adam Jaffe for helpful comments and suggestions. Funding Information: To see if patent activity increases future university-industry collaboration through the Linkage grant, we estimate a similar dynamic panel model using targeted grant award as the dependent variable, treating patent application, targeted grant and non-targeted grant, and publications as endogenous variables. We find that patenting happens in the case of targeted grants being awarded just before or in year one of the grant being awarded, while for non-targeted grants, this is more likely to happen in year three of the project (in most cases the last year of funding). In particular, we find that the coefficients of the first two lags of targeted grant are statistically significant and negative (the third lag is also negative but not statistically significant). This suggests that getting a targeted grant reduces the chance of receiving another targeted grant in the following years. This is likely due to the reduction in applying for a new targeted grant application in subsequent rounds within the funding period as research capacity is reached. This result is also expected as the ARC imposes a limit to the number of ARC grant (Linkage or Discovery) one could concurrently be named as a CI. Second, we find that the contemporaneous patent application also positively increase the submission of (successful) targeted grant, supporting the previous studies on contemporaneous (Stoneman, ) and bidirectional relationships (Altuzarra, ; van Ophem et al., ) between innovation and R&D funding. Furthermore, we found the coefficient of the first lag of patent application to be negative while there is no effect of further lags. This would suggest that inventor with (immediate) past patent application is less likely to start a publicly funded university-industry collaboration; hence there is no evidence to suggest that past patent activity would increase future partnership. Results for patent sealed are replicated in Table . In general, the results are similar to that in Table , with two exceptions. First, patent sealed do not seem to exhibit autocorrelation (correlation with past patent success). Second, the coefficients of contemporaneous and first lag of targeted grant are less precisely estimated using the two-step estimation (specification 2). Funding Information: We acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council (DP180103856; DP180101169). We are grateful to Henri Burgers, Benno Torgler and Adam Jaffe for helpful comments and suggestions. Funding Information: Investigating effect on firm innovation input, a study of UK Higher Education Institutions Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) funding of university-industry partnerships and R&D effort of firms, found a significant and positive impact on firm R&D employment and R&D expenditure per employee. However, the study did not distinguish between university-industry partnerships supported by non-targeted standard grants and those funded through the LINK grant scheme, which accounted for approximately 10% of funding (Scandura, ). Focusing on university-industry partnerships subsidized by the European Union{\textquoteright}s Seventh Framework Programme, Sz{\"u}cs reported the subsidy had no overall effect on the innovation activity of participating firms. Though, firm patent activity was positively affected by the number of participants involved in the project, particularly the number of university participants and academic quality (Sz{\"u}cs, ). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021, Akad{\'e}miai Kiad{\'o}, Budapest, Hungary.",
year = "2022",
month = nov,
day = "24",
doi = "10.1007/s11192-021-04153-0",
language = "English",
volume = "127",
pages = "29--73",
journal = "Scientometrics",
issn = "0138-9130",
publisher = "Springer",
number = "1",
}