The Impact of University Patent Ownership on Commercialization

In recent years, China has sought to promote the commercialization of patents at universities, notably through the three rights (26 universities) and mixed ownership (3 universities) reforms. These two reforms adopted different models for the allocation of university patent ownership. The three rights reform completely allocates patent ownership to the universities in question, while the mixed ownership approach allocates the majority of patent ownership to the inventors. We empirically tested the effects of these two patent ownership allocation models on the commercialization of patents using Chinese patent data and university statistics. We found that the institutional environment (i.e., patent management system) caused unexpected effects in both reform models. The three rights reform has a significant impact on patent licensing, while the mixed ownership reform has significantly increased patent sales while tilting research and development (R&D) toward research with relatively low creativity. These findings yield broader implications for the organization and commercialization of innovations, and this paper contributes to the literature on innovation policies governing the conditions for effective institutional changes.