Inventor group identification approach for selecting university-industry collaboration partners

University-industry collaboration plays an important role in the successful and innovative growth of technology-based firms. For collaborations to be successful, firms should exert considerable effort in selecting the right partner. University partner selection and recommendation approaches have been proposed; however, few studies have focused on the identification of university inventor groups—sets of inventors that are actual candidates for collaborations. Thus, this study proposes a patent-based partner identification approach for identifying appropriate university inventor groups for university-industry collaboration. The proposed approach involves: 1) collecting patent and institution identification data; 2) grouping university inventors based on assignee and co-invention information; 3) screening candidate inventor groups with technical expertise related to the firm's needs; 4) identifying competitive partner groups by evaluating the technological competence, concentration, and size of the candidate inventor groups. Through a case study of an actual target firm, we show that the proposed approach can identify appropriate university partner inventor groups. In the case study, 49 candidate inventor groups are screened, and 12 of them are identified as competitive. This study provides an effective approach based on patent data for identifying inventor groups belonging to universities that are well-suited for collaborative research and development projects with technology-based firms.