Academic patenting in Japan -Some policy issues- Isamu Yamauchi Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) 1 APE-INV 3-4 September 2013

Outline 1.Japanese policy reforms related to academic patenting 2.Some evidence on academic patenting in Japan from existing research – Professors’ privilege and Autonomy 3.Policy issues and future work – Japanese inventor survey 2

Major policy reforms in Japan yearPolicy reform 1995Science and Technology Basic Law 1996Science and Technology Basic Plan 1998TLO Act (Law to Promote the Transfer of University Technologies) 1999Japanese Bayh-Dole Act 2001The 1 st Hiranuma Plan (establishing 1000 startups within three years) 2004Incorporation of national universities 3

Direction of Policy Reforms 4

Reforms during Late90s and early2000s 5 Autonomy University ownership Professors’ Privilege Governmental control JP (Private Univ.) JP (National Univ.) Germany Italy United Kingdom US (private Univ.) Flanders

Identification of university-invented patents with Japanese patent database Standard method (Motohashi and Muramatsu, 2011) – Identifying the inventor’s affiliation by using the postal address 1.In most cases, the inventors working at private company and public research organization write their organization’s address 2.University researchers tend to give personal residential addresses as well as the individual inventors 3.Individual inventors name themselves as applicants, while the university researchers are less likely to be applicants – Assume the patents that the corporate names are listed as applicants and at least one personal residential address is shown in the field of inventors’ address as the university-invented patents 6

Trends of Academic patent 7 Source: Motohashi and Muramatsu (2011) “ Examining the University Industry Collaboration Policy in Japan: Patent Analysis” University-ownedUniversity-invented Share of Academic patent (right axis)

Patent ownership Share of university-owned patents in Japan is similar to that of Germany and UK – consistent with the institutional similarity between Japan and Germany 8

Impact on the patent quality and research subject 9 Firm-owned academic patents have higher number of forward citations in Japan – Policy change can increase the quality of academic patents Policy reforms may tilt the research focus from basic to applied research in Japan – Partly consistent with the Flanders case

Policy concerns (1): Multitask issue Putting an effort on the third mission may reduce the resources that the researchers can allocate to the research and education – Increase in the financial autonomy has increased the tasks for acquiring and managing competitive grants – Kanda and Kuwahara (2011) Research time accounted for 47.5% of the work hours in The percentage fell to 36.1% in 2008 Research quality – Positive correlation between academic patenting and the patent quality (Motohashi and Muramatsu, Shoen and Buenstorf, and Julie et. al) – Carraz (2013) Patenting and publishing are complementary in terms of quantity in Japan – Martinez, Azagra-caro and Maraut (2013) Patenting by public universities has a positive effect on the quality of publication (the number of forward citations to the articles) in Spain – Yoneyama, Watanabe and Hasegawa (2012) An inverse U-shaped relation between the frequency of the collaboration with industry and university researchers’ academic performance 10

Policy concerns (2): low needs for academic patents Low usage rate and low license revenue of academic patents – Average usage rate for academic patents is about 18% in 2009 – The cost of patenting for academics is significantly higher than the license revenue University should take more efficient strategy to screen out the inventions without worth patenting 11 Data source: Survey on Intellectual Property Activity, Japan Patent Office

Research needed Importance of the academic patents for the firm – Who refers to the academic patents? – Share of the academic patents over their backward citations – Impact on the firm’s innovation performance Relative importance of the scientific papers to the academic patents as a knowledge source of corporate inventors’ innovation activities Relationship between the corporate inventors’ science activities and the university’s role as a supplier of scientific knowledge – University’s approach to industry would activate the corporate inventors’ science activities and decrease the importance of the university as a supplier of scientific knowledge – Firm’s scientific activity can improve the absorptive capacity of science and can increase the effect of collaboration with university 12

Inventor Surveys 1.RIETI-Georgia Tech Inventor Survey Target – Japanese inventors on triadic patent applications with priority years from 1995 to Triadic patents: 3,658 2.PatVal2 Survey Target – Japanese inventors on the patent applications filed with both EPO and JPO with priority years from 2003 to 2005 – 5,289 patents Triadic patents: 4,428 13

Corporate inventors’ science activities and importance of scientific papers For the inventors who think of the university as an important knowledge source of the invention, – Both patents and papers are rated high value as a knowledge source – Importance of patent has increased while the importance of papers has decreased – Frequency of writing academic papers has increased during a decade The role of the university as a supplier of the scientific papers has been decreasing for the corporate inventors – Corporate inventors have come to bear a part of the role of writing papers 14

Concluding remarks (Future work) How the industry uses the academic patents Whether the use of academic patents improves the firm’s innovation performance – Differentiate the long-term effect and the short-term effect Impact of industrialization of the university on corporate inventors’ scientific activity 15 Balancing the “Industrialization of academics” and the “Academization of industry” is important