| dc.description.abstract | Since the initiation of the Bayh-Dole Act in the 1980s in the United States (US) of America, patenting at universities gained ample attention. Since then patenting activities are continuously increasing in both the US as well as in Europe. However, universities do not only hold patents which have been successfully exploited, but also patents which remain unused, also called sleeping patents. The aim of this thesis was to discover reasons why some universities’ patents remain unused while others are being commercialized. Hereby, the two sub-questions, “to which degree do universities hold sleeping patents?” and “what factors explain that university patents remain unused?” were created to help approach this phenomenon in more detail. For this, the patents of three Dutch universities, namely (1) Utrecht University (UU) and University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU), (2) Leiden University (LU) and University Medical Center Leiden (LUMC), and (3) Groningen University (GU) and University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), were analyzed to gain insights of this phenomenon. To this end, a quantitative method approach was chosen, whereby an online survey was sent to 1000 inventors. These were analyzed with a regression analysis, which is designed to show the influence of the four potential characteristics that were deduced from the eight categories of the institutional readiness (IR) framework. The results showed that some patents owned by universities remain unused, while others are commercialized, could be explained by the fact that some inventions from a university are too radical in character since inventions are more likely to be used when building upon previous technologies. Also, the importance of the economic use of patents must be perceived high by the inventors in order to attain commercial use of the patents. Thus, universities’ actors must have the capability to assess these two factors in advance in order to facilitate innovations. In light of this, this study is particularly interesting for universities to increase the commercialization rate of their patent portfolio. The researcher aimed not only to provide interdisciplinary knowledge, but also that this topic will receive attention, so that further research can be done in the future. | |
