Public Policy and the Evolution of Technology Transfer in France

Title: Invention in Academia and the Impact of Public Policy. Name: Elodie Carpentier. Affiliation: GREThA University of Bordeaux. Year of enrollment: 2016. Expected final date: December 2020. Email address: elodie.carpentier@u-bordeaux.fr Economists, as well as policy-makers, agree nowadays that university-generated inventions contribute decisively to the economic growth of nations and improves welfare. In the literature, an intense debate focuses on which policy should be implemented in order to increase professors’ incentives to invent as well as fostering the dissemination of these inventions. In this debate, the central question is who should own the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)? (Kenney and Patton, 2009). While they could be released in the public domain, granted to the professor-inventor, to the academic institution or the companies involved in the project, still little is known on the impact of each of these ownership regimes. In France, as well as in most of advanced economies, the IPR belong to the university. However, many academic institutions traditionally did not manage their intellectual property rights, and thus often, intentionally or unintentionally, did not retain the rights on the inventions their staff were involved in. Since 1999, a series of laws has been implemented in order to incentivize universities to increasingly retain the ownership of their inventions. Despite the alleged role of academic invention on nations technological edges, and the activism of policy makers in the domain, yet we must acknowledge that much is still to be uncovered the precise impact of implementing those policies. Accordingly, the goal of the study is to evaluate the impact of public policy on academic invention. Our data includes nearly all the tenured professors and researchers in France over the period (2005-2016), about sixty thousand persons. Using various data-mining procedures, we collect all the patents they invented in three offices (EPO, USPTO and French INPI), irrespective to the assignee of the patent. Our approach also allows us to observe how rights are allocated over those inventions. We develop a new methodology targeting a change in strategies toward IP management operated by 23 institutions among the 145 in our database. We use CEM and negative binomial regressions to assess the effect of such policy implementation on academic invention and its quality. Our results indicate that universities increasingly retained ownership on their inventions since 1999, with an increase of 150% of universities and PRO-owned academic inventions, a volume of joint-IP multiplied by 15 and a decrease of 20% of companies-owned academic inventions. According to our results, applying the university ownership regime increases academic inventions by 62%, has no crowding-out effect on the number of companies-owned inventions, does not decrease the average quality of academic inventions, whatever its transfer regime and strengthens the protection of academic inventions, and their breadth (in particular when co-owned). Public Policy and the Evolution of Technology Transfer in France Nicolas Carayol and Elodie Carpentier ∗ Preliminary Working Draft. Please do not quote without author’s permission.