THE ROLES OF ACADEMIC INVENTORS IN MEDICAL INNOVATION PROCESSES: EXPLORING THE INFLUENCE OF IPR OWNERSHIP AND IP NATURE

This paper analyses four medical innovation processes originating from Stanford and Uppsala universities with the purpose of understanding how intellectual property rights (IPR) ownership and intellectual property (IP) nature influence the behaviour of academic inventors. We analyse this behaviour through the roles enacted and evaluate the requirements the roles pose by developing a method to assess the requirements of individual roles, which we label as role intensity. We find that both IPR ownership and IP nature can influence the academic inventors’ roles and role intensities. In contrast to assumptions in research and policy, we find that IPR ownership does not influence the roles and role intensities in a remarkable way. We also find support that research and policy should distinguish between patentable and non-patentable inventions in the field of medical invention as these two types of IP nature are associated with different roles and role intensities. These findings contribute to the literature on commercialisation of science and innovation management by demonstrating the importance of IP nature in influencing the roles of inventors. Managerial and policy implications are provided.

OUT-LICENSING IN MARKETS WITH ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION: THE CASE OF THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

Few large pharmaceutical companies have recently discovered out-licensing of terminated R&D results as a way to recoup some of the significant investments made in R&D and to improve R&D productivity. Our empirical investigation reveals that the licensing partners are preferably young, small and highly specialized companies. This reverses the traditional logic of out-licensing. While out-licensing is usually done because of downstream concerns, our analysis shows that the company which owns the necessary assets for further development (the large pharmaceutical company) sells the license to a firm (the small partner company) which has — at the time of deal closure — no track record to prove its ability to successfully develop the compound.

As the lack of a track record does not allow the pharmaceutical company to distinguish between the partner firms based on their development capabilities, these out-licensing deals are characterized by an asymmetric distribution of information. The application of the theory of adverse selection allows deriving managerial recommendations along three dimensions of the out-licensing deal: product coverage, price setting and performance presumption. By making changes along these dimensions, R&D managers are able to reduce the information asymmetry and approximate an equilibrium in the out-licensing market.

AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS ON ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY BASED ON LINKAGE WITH ACADEMIA

In this paper, we empirically explain how scientific knowledge assimilated from academia affects corporate performance, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry of Japan. We use balanced panel data on 46 pharmaceutical firms in Japan for the period 1992–2005. Then, we introduce a new concept, propensity to capture basic research (PCBR), to index how much scientific knowledge firms have assimilated from universities and public research institutes. We use this index to verify whether absorption of such knowledge influences corporate performance. According to econometric analysis, PCBR is positively significant for patent applications and patent efficiency but not for number of approved drugs. This obviously implies that scientific knowledge assimilated from academia is effective for technological performance in firms. Moreover, the results suggest how R&D is structured in the organizational setup of Japanese pharmaceutical firms.