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Although many university inventions and discoveries originating from academia are at a stage beyond basic research, they are yet insufficiently developed to be transformed into innovations without additional research designed to establish proofs of principle (POP) at many levels: technical proof, intellectual property control proof, safety proof, value proof, economic proof and attractiveness proof. Based on the data of a large survey of Canadian academics in natural sciences and engineering, the results of this study show that about 20% of the surveyed respondents engaged in different forms of POP despite the absence of incentives to do so. The results also suggest the presence of interdependence (complementarities) between the different forms of POP. Finally, the results show that funding from industry, strong ties with industry and use of services provided by university technology transfer offices are positively associated with the different forms of POP. These results are used to derive policy implications and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent growth in inward and outward technology transfer, e.g., by means of technology licensing, reflects the new paradigm of open innovation. By actively acquiring and commercialising intellectual property in the technology markets, these open innovation processes contrast traditional closed innovation processes. Prior open innovation research has largely been limited to case studies and theoretical contributions, and other lines of research have focused either on inward or outward technology transfer without taking an integrative perspective. Therefore, I simultaneously consider inward and outward technology transfer as the two main directions of open innovation. On this basis, data from a survey of 154 industrial firms are used to test four hypotheses relating the size and quality of the corporate patent portfolio to a firm's extent of external technology acquisition and external technology commercialisation. The results show that the corporate intellectual property portfolio constitutes a major determinant of opening up the innovation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International organisations advocate global convergence in intellectual property as a prerequisite for successful innovation strategies. The difficulties of achieving such harmonisation are, however, evident from the attempts of several nations to develop divergent intellectual property systems. This paper explores the causes of institutional divergence and uses intellectual property for seed markets in India as a case study. The Indian seed market case demonstrates that convergence and divergence may go hand in hand. The ‘domestication’ of global protection models for seed and biotechnology may require divergence in order to be accepted by domestic stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarises a sequence of studies of technology trade and strategies for acquisition and exploitation of technology in large corporations in Sweden, the USA and Japan during the 1980s and 1990s, Licensing in and out, and technology trade more generally, have old origins but have played only a marginal role in most companies across industries as a co-evolving complement rather than substitute for internal R&D and product sales. However, external acquisition of technology through acquisitions, joint ventures, technology purchasing and intelligence was found to have increased substantially in recent decades across sectors in large Japanese, Swedish and US corporations. With the advent of the pro-patent era in the 1980s and the concomitant surge in patenting and IP activities more generally, a pro-licensing era could be hypothesised to follow. Various empirical studies and observations have also recognised the growing importance of technology markets in general and the growth and changing nature of licensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the preliminary results of patenting and licensing activities in Taiwanese Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from 1997 to 2001. We propose a framework to analyse the influence of a university's internal Intellectual Property Right (IPR) management and external research partnerships on creating income through patenting and licensing. Through a postal questionnaire survey, all 122 HEIs in Taiwan were surveyed. The empirical results demonstrate that internalised IPR management capability and external research partnerships have substantially increased the amount of academic patents and licensing income. The paper reveals that the relation between external research partnership and patterns of academic licensing is moderated by industry research funding, towards more domestic and partner-oriented licensing. This has crucial policy implications for enhancing effective national triple-helix interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]