University Patents

McNair Project

University Patents
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Project Overview

Goal: list of all universities and # of patents each university and patent licensing

patent reassignment to startups associated with these universities

clinical trials (from Catherine) data to rank universities R&D engagement

identify list of universities: board of regents, universities in patent data (find patterns associated with university assignees)

AUTM?

What to get from other people

Avesh has clinical trial data on wiki and bulk drive (FDA Trials Data), need to build it into normal form, use clinical trials data to rank R&D engagement of universities, will be building up portfolios of different types of companies

Marcela is cleaning up patent data

Catherine has zip codes of medical centers, use to look through patent data

Questions

• How innovative are universities compared to publicly-traded firms, etc.? (firms: 100 active patents at any given time)
• How do universities license?
• What does the average portfolio look like for universities? (compared to publicly traded, VC-backed, etc)
• What can explain the differences in rankings? (size, quality of universities, TTOs and quality/experience of workers - searched LinkedIns, geography, entrepreneurship programs, NIH/NSF grants)

To Do

1. lit review (look at for 1-2 days), look for holistic picture, what has/hasn’t been done? what are the questions people are asking?

2. look at patent data, determine how to find universities in patent database: board of regents, universities in patent data (find patterns associated with university assignees)

Lit Reviews

Bessen, Ford, Meurer: The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls (2011) - example

Findings

• "NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies."

• "During the last four years the lost wealth has averaged over $80 billion per year."

• "We argue that patents on software and business methods are litigated much more frequently because they have “fuzzy boundaries.”"

• "Some characteristics of defendant firms in our sample are reported in Table 1. These are, on average, large firms."

Data Sources

The $500 billion of lost wealth is calculated by measuring the loss in stock price after the announcement of a patent lawsuit.

NPE list is taken from [Patent Freedom https://www.patentfreedom.com/], which is owned by RPX Corporation. RPX Corporation provides services to defend against NPE lawsuits.

RPX: "Since 2008, we have spent $2+ billion on patent assets, acquiring more than 15,000 US and international patent assets and rights."[1] RPX is an NPE.

Critiques

Share price analysis only works for publicly traded companies.

RPX Corporation's business model of litigation protection services may benefit from an increased number of NPE lawsuits, especially those that they claim were defended effectively due to RPX Corporation help. A conflict of interest exists for RPX between providing accurate database information and inflating numbers to generate more revenue for the business.

RPX explains how they define PAEs [2]:

"• RPX identifies public PAEs through a manual review process performed by experienced employees with knowledge of the patent industry. • The process includes, among other things, reviewing public filings; searching for evidence of operating or patent monetization activities on the Internet, including company websites; reviewing complaints, with a focus on accused products and allegations regarding products and/or services sold by the patent owner; considering the outside counsel employed by the entity (e.g. whether outside counsel has a history of representing public PAEs); reviewing corporate disclosure statements filed in litigation; and soliciting market intelligence from patent professionals. • The public PAEs for this particular report represent the largest, most established public PAEs as well as several recently formed public PAEs that have become public via reverse mergers. • While there are elements of subjectivity in this approach, RPX believes that the process is robust based on feedback from other patent professionals "

Other Discoveries

Yanagisawa and Guellec (2009) provide definitions on NPEs.

Public PAEs are under performing the market (based off share price). If PAEs are not making enough money, will they become desperate and sue more firms, or reduce their assertion activities because of high court costs?[3]

Thursby, J. & Thursby, M.: Who Is Selling the Ivory Tower? Sources of Growth in University Licensing (2002)

[4]

Findings

• The survey supports the view that industry reliance on university inventions increased during this period, and, in indicating the reasons, respondents weighted changes in their own R&D more heavily than a change in faculty research toward topics of greater interest to industry. Together with the productivity results, this suggests that the primary reason for increased invention disclosures may indeed be an increased propensity for faculty to disclose rather than a change in research focus. The industry survey also supports an increased receptivity of universities to industry contracts. (92)

Data Sources

AUTM surveys

Other Discoveries

These results contribute to the growing literature on the industrial impact of academic research. The bulk of this literature has focused either on the role of patents and publications in the transfer process (see Adams 1990, Henderson et al. 1998, and Jaffe et al. 1993) or on consulting, sponsored research or institutional ties (see Cohen et al. 1998; Mansfield 1995; Zucker et al. 1994, 1998). While several recent papers provide evidence on the nature of university licensing (e.g., Jensen and Thursby 2001, Mowery et al. 2001a,b, Mowery et al. 2001, Siegel et al. 1999, Thursby et al. 2001, Thursby and Kemp 2001), none of them provides a structure that allows analysis of the sources of growth.

Thursby, J., Jensen, Thursby, M.: Objectives, Characteristics and Outcomes of University Licensing: A Survey of Major U.S. Universities (2000)

[5]