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Recent initiatives by a number of OECD governments suggest considerable interest in emulating the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, a piece of legislation that is widely credited with stimulating significant growth in university-industry technology transfer and research collaboration in the US. We examine the effects of Bayh-Dole on university-industry collaboration and technology transfer in the US, emphasizing the lengthy history of both activities prior to 1980 and noting the extent to which these activities are rooted in the incentives created by the unusual scale and structure (by comparison with Western Europe or Japan) of the US higher education system. Efforts at \"emulation\" of the Bayh-Dole policy elsewhere in the OECD are likely to have modest success at best without greater attention to the underlying structural differences among the higher education systems of these nations.

A substantial literature on nanotechnology innovation and commercial development has characterized several elements of these phenomena as constituting new developments in the US national innovation system. Among these elements are the (asserted) “post-academic” nature of US universities’ involvement with nanotechnology R&D, and federal funding of nanotechnology R&D on goals related to economic competitiveness. This paper challenges the “novelty” of these elements, while suggesting that other elements of nanotechnology R&D, including the extensive patenting of the results of nanotechnology-related research and the emphasis within many university-industry collaborations on patent-based channels for “technology transfer,” may indeed be new and raise questions for the long-term efficiency and innovative performance of nanotechnology-related R&D.

This paper examines interfirm knowledge transfers within strategic alliances. Using a new measure of changes in alliance partners' technological capabilities, based on the citation patterns of their patent portfolios, we analyze changes in the extent to which partner firms' technological resources `overlap' as a result of alliance participation. This measure allows us to test hypotheses from the literature on interfirm knowledge transfer in alliances, with interesting results: we find support for some elements of this `received wisdom'-equity arrangements promote greater knowledge transfer, and `absorptive capacity' helps explain the extent of technological capability transfer, at least in some alliances. But the results also suggest limits to the `capabilities acquisition' view of strategic alliances. Consistent with the argument that alliance activity can promote increased specialization, we find that the capabilities of partner firms become more divergent in a substantial subset of alliances.

US university patenting and licensing have grown significantly in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The Act's effects on US research universities have been the focus of several empirical studies. The Mowery and Ziedonis (2002) findings leave open the possibility that the characteristics of patents issued to less experienced academic patenters after 1980 might improve during the remainder of the 1980s and 1990s as these institutions gain experience in patenting the inventions of their faculty. This paper examines university learning in greater detail, seeking to understand whether and why the importance of the post-1980 patents issuing to less experienced academic patenters has improved during the 1980s and 1990s.

This paper analyzes the relationship between process innovation and learning by doing in the semiconductor industry where improvements in manufacturing yield are a catalyst for dynamic cost reductions. In contrast to most previous studies of learning by doing, the learning curve is shown here to be the product of deliberate activities intended to improve yields and reduce costs, rather than the incidental byproduct of production volume. Since some of the knowledge acquired through learning by doing during new process development is specific to the production environment where the process is developed, some knowledge is effectively lost when a new process is transferred to manufacturing. We find that dedicated process development facilities, geographic proximity between development and manufacturing facilities, and the duplication of equipment between development and manufacturing facilities are all significant in improving performance in introducing new technologies. Once in manufacturing, new processes are shown to disrupt the ongoing learning activities of existing processes by drawing away scarce engineering resources to \"debug\" the new processes.

The “national systems of innovation” (NSI) framework for analyzing innovative performance and policy has been an important and influential area of scholarship for nearly 20 years, since the first articulation of the concept in Freeman (Technology policy and economic performance: lessons from Japan, 1987). Surprisingly, however, the large literature on national systems of innovation has devoted little attention to the role of defense-related R&D investment and innovation. This paper surveys the role of national defense within national innovation systems, focusing in particular on the United States during and after the Cold War, including a brief description of post-9/11 trends in defense-related and national security investments in R&D. I also summarize some of the abundant literature on the role of defense-related R&D and procurement within specific sectors of U.S. industry, including aircraft, machine tools, and information technology.

Public Universities and Regional Growth examines evolutions in research and innovation at six University of California campuses. Each chapter presents a deep, historical analysis that traces the dynamic interaction between particular campuses and regional firms in industries that range from biotechnology, scientific instruments, and semiconductors, to software, wine, and wireless technologies. The book provides a uniquely comprehensive and cohesive look at the University of California's complex relationships with regional entrepreneurs. As a leading public institution, the UC is an examplar for other institutions of higher education at a time when the potential and value of these universities is under scrutiny. Any yet, by recent accounts, public research universities performed nearly 70% of all academic research and approximately 60% of federally funded R&D in the United States. Thoughtful and distinctive, Public Universities and Regional Growth illustrates the potential for universities to drive knowledge-based growth while revealing the California system as a uniquely powerful engine for innovation across its home state.

Why do firms use continuations in the prosecution of their patents? Motivated by the widespread use of continuations by U.S. firms and the prominence of this procedure in U.S. patent policy debates, we investigate the influence of corporate and patent characteristics on the use of continuations. We employ novel data on applicants and their filings of three types of continuations—the continuation application (CAP), the continuations in part (CIP), and divisions—during 1981–2000 to distinguish among the motives for continuing patents. We find that CIPs are disproportionately filed by research and development-intensive firms that patent heavily, and that these continuations are more common in chemical and biological technologies. Patents issuing from CIPs cover relatively important inventions and their use appears consistent with a strategy of protecting \"pioneering inventions.\" In contrast, CAPs and divisions are associated with less important patents assigned to capital-intensive firms, particularly in computer and semiconductor fields, and appear to be used in defensive patenting strategies. We analyze the effects of the 1995 change in patent term, and find that the act reduced continuations overall and shifted the output of continuations toward less important patents.