| Abstract: |
This paper aims to identify factors that relate to scientists’ propensity to
make commercially significant scientific discoveries (inventions) and to
describe how these inventions are commercialized. Based on a large survey of
academics active in different fields of science at U.S. universities, the
paper benchmarks the top 20 universities against the rest, identifying the
impact of different institutional settings. To highlight the institutional
setting, the paper also compares these results to similar survey data from
Finland, representing a small, highly educated European country. This
comparison addresses the ‘European paradox’ in university technology
commercialization, which is characterized by high investments in university
research and disappointingly low levels of inventions and related
commercialization activity. The results show that the likelihood of making
commercially valuable scientific discoveries in the U.S. is driven by
motivations related to the identification of commercial opportunities and
working in interdisciplinary research environments. There are also significant
differences between the various fields of science. In the top U.S.
universities, the funding sources for scientists more likely to make
inventions are more diversified and unique. The results for Finland are
surprisingly similar, suggesting that the cause of the ‘European paradox’
seems to originate in the commercialization of inventions rather than their
generation. When focusing on inventors who actively pursue commercial goals,
both U.S. and Finnish inventors prefer licensing as the most popular way of
taking scientific discoveries to the market. Consulting and entrepreneurship
rank second and third, respectively. The countries differ with respect to both
the inventors’ motivations to commercialize inventions and their reasons to
refrain from it. In Finland, the motivations for not pursuing commercial
opportunities are much more prominent than among U.S. scientists. |