| Abstract: |
Research on intellectual property has focused on formal legally recorded
rights that we call deeded, most often measured by granted patents. Meanwhile,
other “defacto” IP (mainly purposive secrecy and natural excludability) has
become more important because of the increasing closeness of commercial
technologies to cutting edge science. A “corporate-academic” model has
developed and become institutionalized over the last three decades which
emphasizes attracting the best and brightest scientists, providing them with a
commensurate increase in autonomy including initiation of bench-level
collaborations with top university scientists in which valuable tacit
knowledge is transferred in both directions. We provide suggestive evidence
that both firm and university scientists learn from these collaborations,
e.g., both types of scientists experience sharply higher patenting rates once
they have engage in university-firm collaborations. We propose and test two
indicators of adoption of the corporate-academic model, whether or not the
firm has ever: (a) co-authored an article with a university scientist and (b)
applied for (an eventually granted) patent with non-patent references, where
these references are used importantly to cite scientific articles and other
scientific materials. Both were robustly positive and statistically
significant across four measures of U.S. high-tech firm success (publishing,
patenting, obtaining venture capital, and going public) for six broad S&T
areas (bio/chem/med, information technology, nanotechnology, semiconductors,
other science, and other engineering). Star scientists publication as or with
firm employees, SBIR grants received, and citation-weighted patents and
articles all played comparatively supporting roles in the empirical estimates.
We concluded that the most successful high-tech firms have adopted a strategy
of operating near the edge of the scientific envelope where high levels of
tacit knowledge provide substantial natural excludability reducing or
preventing entry of imitators. |