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This paper investigates the impact of the timing of patent rights on licensing performance in the context of university technology licensing. We provide an argument that the timing of patent allowance, i.e., a legal event that clarifies patent rights, in the technology licensing phase can alter licensing performance by shifting technology valuation, as well as behavioral dynamics, in the process of commercialization. By analyzing inventions disclosed from Stanford University, we find that preallowance licensing (i.e., entering a licensing arrangement prior to patent allowance), compared to postallowance licensing, is negatively associated with licensing performance by increasing the chances of licensing underperformance. However, licensing underperformance associated with preallowance licensing is only significant when the inventor and licensee do not have prior collaboration experience. This study emphasizes the importance of understanding the temporal condition of appropriability in the route for technology commercialization by revealing the patent‐licensing timing sequence as a source of variation in university technology licensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experts have difficulty assessing the economic value of university-originated technologies due to the high level of uncertainty associated with the commercialization of early stage and basic technologies. This article proposes a random forest approach to the valuation of university-originated technologies that integrates monetary value and patent value models for technology valuation. First, a technological characteristics-value matrix was constructed after defining a total of 23 indicators from the U.S. Patent and Trademark and Scopus databases and extracting the value of university-originated technologies from technology transaction databases. Second, a random forest model, an ensemble machine learning model based on a multitude of decision trees, was employed to assess the economic value of university-originated technologies. Finally, the performance of our approach was assessed using quantitative metrics. A case study of the technologies registered in the Office of Technology Licensing of Stanford University confirms, with statistically significant outcomes, that our method is valuable as a complementary tool for the valuation of university-originated technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological innovation, as a collaboration among inventors and complementary knowledge professionals, requires the management of knowledge boundaries and the integration of specialised tasks. We propose that dense collaborations among inventors and professionals facilitate the process of collaboration by reducing coordination cost and by mitigating the uncertainties inherent in technological innovation. In the empirical context of university technology commercialisation, we find that the relational density of three main actors, i.e. inventors, technology managers, and patent attorneys, enhances technology licensing, a major milestone in commercialisation. This occurs especially when the technological field is less institutionalised. Our study contributes to the literature on technological innovation by highlighting the role of interpersonal relations between inventors and complementary knowledge providers as a coordination mechanism in the innovation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]