Knowledge flows between universities and industry: the impact of distance, technological compatibility, and the ability
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Knowledge flows between universities and industry: the impact of distance, technological compatibility, and the ability to diffuse knowledge Nivedita Mukherji1 · Jonathan Silberman1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This paper uses citations to university-issued patents to investigate the knowledge flow from 91 US research universities to businesses assigned to 142 US cities or metropolitan areas (MSAs) from which they filed their patent applications. The citation of university patents depends on the various types of separation between the universities (origin) and businesses (destination) measured by distance, technological compatibility, and the presence of a state or local border. The analysis also accounts for university and citing region fixed effects. We use these to report original measures of the ability of universities to diffuse knowledge and the capacity of firms in MSAs to absorb university knowledge. We find that citations to university patents are significantly higher for universities in the same location as the citing firms, and the same location effect is greater for public than private universities. The distance indicator variables show that citations at distances beyond 50 miles are not different from citations beyond 2000 miles. Technological compatibility of university and industry patents has a large impact on university patent citations and exhibits considerably variation across university–MSA/city pairs. MIT has the largest fixed effect (diffusion) estimate, and its value is more than twice the diffusion estimate of Stanford, the university with the second highest value. The academic quality of universities and characteristics of their technology transfer office are found to positively impact the ability of universities to diffuse knowledge. Keywords Innovation · Knowledge flows · Patent citations · Knowledge spillovers JEL Classification O30 · O33 · R10 · R12
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1096 1-019-09770-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Nivedita Mukherji [email protected] Jonathan Silberman [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309, USA
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N. Mukherji, J. Silberman
1 Introduction Productivity growth is imperative for sustainable economic growth. Universities contribute to industrial productivity growth by generating and disseminating new knowledge through scientific publications, patents, licenses, spin-offs, and other technology transfer mechanisms (Astebro and Bazzazain 2011; Bozeman et al. 2013; Laursen and Salter 2004). In this paper, we focus on patent citations to study the knowledge flow from U.S. research universities to firms in U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs). Patent citations offer a non-market channel of knowledge spillovers from the inventors of the original patent to those of the citing patent. While not all patents lead to innovation (Ha
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