Engaging the inventor: exploring licensing strategies for university inventions and the role of latent knowledge
研究了大学发明许可中，直接让发明者参与开发阶段能否提高商业化成功率，基于麻省理工学院124份许可协议的数据分析支持这一假设。
Abstract A significant portion of knowledge generated by university inventors remains latent (uncodified but codifiable), even though this information is valuable to firms that have licensed their inventions and famously strong incentives exist to disseminate academic findings widely. However, the licensee may access and exploit this latent knowledge by engaging the inventor during the development phase. This paper examines the hypothesis that licensing strategies that directly engage the inventor increase the likelihood and degree of commercialization success. While this may seem somewhat apparent, firms in the sample under investigation vary substantially in the degree to which they engage the inventor: one third of the sample does not engage the inventor at all. On the other hand, the hypothesis might seem surprising given the norms of open science under which university labs are expected to operate. Regression analyses based on a unique dataset of 124 license agreements associated with inventions from MIT support the hypothesis and generate results that are robust to a variety of controls. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.