Workshop

Workshop on the implications of increasing university-industry collaboration and the appropriation of academic research findings

This informal workshop presents three papers that examine the effects of a growing emphasis on industry involvement in academic research and on the appropriation of publicly funded research results:

• Academic-business cooperations in biotechnology: Who cooperates with firms, and why? By Lee Davis and Peter Lotz.

• Does industrial relevance in public science come at the expense of basic research? Exploring tradeoffs in academic research. By Maria Theresa Larsen.

• Effects on academia-industry collaboration of extending university property rights. By Finn Valentin and Rasmus Lund Jensen.

Please see the abstracts below for more information.

To receive a copy of the papers, please send an email to

Maria Theresa Larsen.

The three papers will also be presented at the

SPRU 40th anniversary conference on “The Future of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy: Linking Research and Practice,” Brighton, United Kingdom, September 11-13, 2006.

ABSTRACTS:

Academic-business cooperations in biotechnology: Who cooperates with firms, and why?

By

Lee Davis and

Peter Lotz, Associate Professors at IVS

Abstract: Academic scientists are under increasing pressure to engage in more commercially “relevant” research, through either patenting and licensing research results, or research cooperations. This paper seeks to add to our understanding of academic-business collaborations (contract research, joint research, and consulting) by presenting preliminary results from a novel survey of academic researchers in the life sciences in Denmark. We seek to draw a “profile” of those researchers who cooperate, and why. Expressed in a different way, we would like to determine what researcher characteristics and competencies business, in practice, demands. Both university and hospital scientists were polled. Our most surprising finding is that there is a consistent and highly significant relationship between strong publication records and cooperation, across both researcher groups, and for all forms of cooperation. Our results underline that it is important that scientists be permitted – indeed, encouraged – to continue to operate within the norms of the academic community, where success is measured by the collegial reputation-based reward system, thereby maintaining a clear division of labor between what scientists do best, and what business does best.

Does industrial relevance in public science come at the expense of basic research? Exploring tradeoffs in academic research.

By

Maria Theresa Larsen, PhD Fellow at IVS.

Abstract: The assumption that public science faces a tradeoff between basic and applied research has sparked concerns that universities dedicate increasing resources to applied research to the detriment of basic research (the so-called "skewing problem"). Several recent studies have investigated this issue, yet there is no clear evidence that increasing applied research is undertaken at the expense of basic research. In fact, most of these studies find no indication of a tradeoff between the two forms of research and instead draw attention to the complementary nature of their relationship.

This study of the publication records of 120 professors at a technical university in Denmark revisits a methodology applied in a number of recent studies. It finds that a more conservative operationalization of the notions of “basic research” and “applied research” has a significant impact on subsequent findings and reveals a more concerning picture of the state of basic research than found in previous studies. The data show a positive association between increasing university-industry collaboration and the amount of applied research undertaken in academia. Moreover, preliminary findings indicate a stagnation (and possibly a slight decrease) in basic research activity starting in the mid-1990s, around which time we would expect the effects of the push for greater industry involvement and increasing application-oriented research in academia to materialize. Although further analysis of these data is needed, initial findings thus suggest that the chapter on the "skewing problem" is far from closed.

Effects on academia-industry collaboration of extending university property rights.

By

Finn Valentin, Professor at IVS, and

Rasmus Lund Jensen, Research Analyst at IVS

Abstract: Studying the contribution from university scientists to inventions patented by Danish and Swedish dedicated biotech firms (DBFs), we examine effects of the Law on University Patenting (LUP) implemented in Denmark in January 2000, transferring to the employer university rights to patents on inventions made by Danish university scientists alone or as participants in collaborative research with industry. Sweden so far has refrained from reforming academic property rights along the lines of LUP, leaving Swedish academic property rights much the way they also were in Denmark prior to the reform. Consequently, systematic comparison of Danish and Swedish research collaboration before and after LUP offers a quasi-controlled experiment, bringing out effects on joint research of regulation affecting its IPR framework.

Using original data on all 3589 inventor participations behind the 976 patents filed by Danish and Swedish DBFs during 1990-2004 we model quarterly shares of university inventors in each country as time series to test event effects of LUP on Danish academic participation rates. Whereas this rate remains significantly stable in the Swedish data, a trend of increasing Danish academic participation is identified through the 1990s, turning into a steeper decreasing trend after LUP. Concurrent with this post-LUP decline a notable increasing trend in non-Danish academic participations is identified, substituting for and finally becoming larger than the shares of domestic academic participations.

Examination of possible mechanisms by which LUP could have induced the substitution of domestic with non-Danish academics, indicate as the most likely cause that academic-industrial collaboration in this area typically addresses issues at so early stages of drug discovery that their eventual value cannot be assessed, hence precluding rational contracting of shared or transferred property rights.

The outcome implies a loss for industrial biotech research in Denmark, as well as for university scientists, for whom the focus on early and more fundamental issues in joint discovery made the collaboration attractive on pure scientific criteria. Observed trends are inconsistent with LUP’s declared objectives of “…ensuring that research results produced by means of public funds shall be utilized for the Danish society through commercial exploitation”.