Generating technological knowledge in Spanish universities: an exploration of patent data.

SUMMARY

In this study we provide a set of elements that allows evaluation of a facet of the university's role in technological development and economic growth. Currently conceived as elements in a system of innovation, universities fulfill three essential functions: first, they lead long-term scientific research that contributes to advancing the technological frontiers of industry; second, they generate applied knowledge to develop industrial production processes; third, they provide the principal inputs of industrial innovation--the human resources that are incorporated in industry, or the researchers working in those institutions that collaborate with the private industrial sector. Our objective in this article is to explore in detail the second of these functions: the magnitude, technological characteristics, regional peculiarities and the explanatory causes of the direct contribution of universities to the development of industrial technology. The results show that the contribution of the university to the development of industrial technology is determined not only by the capabilities of the universities themselves, but also by the presence of a powerful technological environment that constitutes a source of demand for technology.

KEY WORDS

generation of technological knowledge; patents; university role; innovation systems; applied knowledge; industrial development; economic development; demand for technology

INTRODUCTION

The traditional mission of universities, as institutions charged with training of human resources and with research, is giving way to a new form of understanding them as organizations whose function is more directed towards economic and social development. Academic research is demonstrating the leading role of the university as an instrument integrated in a wider system of innovation that is capable of strengthening technological and economic development. The new literature on national/regional systems of innovation (Freeman, 1988; Nelson, 1993; Lundvall, 1992; Braczyk et al., 1998; Cooke et al., 1998) based on the approaches of the evolutionary economy initially postulated by Nelson and Winter (1982), attributes a substantial role to the different institutions that intervene in this complex process and, above all, to the organizational aspects. University, company and government are identified as principal elements of the system of innovation. In a similar line, the thesis of the Triple Helix model (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997, 2000; Leydesdorff, 2000) establishes that the university can play an essential role in the process of innovation, and thus strengthen knowledge-based societies. The underlying model is analytically different from the systems of innovation in which the company is considered to be the central element that leads the process of innovation. The basic question that this proposition is intended to answer is whether the university can confront economic development as the third of its missions, in addition to those of research and training (Etch and Leyd, 2000). In these types of model, different possibilities are proposed concerning the relationship between the institutional spheres--university, industry and government--that may help to generate alternative strategies for economic growth and social transformation. Although some of these approaches are designed theoretically more from a national than a regional perspective, the territorial and geographic dimension is implicit from the fact of recognizing the importance of interactive learning between institutions, the presence of a flow of tacit knowledge that increases with physical proximity and, no less important, the high degree of self-government of many of the European regions that in some cases establish their own regional organization to promote innovation.

In this modern conception, the universities perform three essential functions as elements of a system of innovation (Schartinger et al., 2002; Smith, 1995):

1. They lead the general process of scientific research that has a long term effect on the technological frontiers of industry;

2. They generate a type of knowledge that is directly applicable to industrial production processes;

3. They provide the principal inputs of the process of industrial innovation: the specialized human resources employed by industry, or the researchers working in those institutions that collaborate with the private industrial sector.

Our objective in this article is to explore in detail the second of these functions; in other words, we consider the magnitude, technological characteristics, regional peculiarities and explanatory causes of the direct contribution of universities to the development of industrial technology. More specifically, we set out to answer the following questions:

* What is the magnitude of the commercially useful technology that is generated in the universities?;

* In which sectors is this technology generated?;

* What relationship exists between the technology developed in the universities and companies' own technology?;

* What is the quality of the technology produced in the universities, in comparison with that of the private sector?;

* What regional differences exist in all these questions? and

* What are the factors that determine the development of technological knowledge in the universities?

This study is based on the treatment of all the domestic patents registered by Spanish universities during the period 1998-2001. Several research studies have demonstrated that the analysis of patents is a sufficiently valid and objective method for determining technology transfer (Archibugi, 1992; Basberg, 1987; Boitani and Ciciotti, 1990; Trajtenberg, 1990). Also the accessibility of patents allows a more comprehensive treatment than surveys or case studies (Henderson et al., 1998).

We believe that this present study presents various aspects of interest. First, it contributes to an evaluation of one of the ways in which the universities play a part in technological and economic development. Second, improved knowledge of the technological development potential existing in universities, and of the explanatory causes underlying this potential, can facilitate the more effective organization of regional, national or supranational systems of innovation. Third, it deals with a phenomenon that is of interest in its own right; the scientific output of the universities is well known but, until now, very little attention has been paid to the technological results generated in the universities. Lastly, the framework that we suggest can be applied to other contexts for analysis of similar characteristics.

The article is organized in five parts. In the following section, we consider the previous literature; in the third section, we present the methodology followed to obtain answers to the questions we put forward by way of hypotheses; in the fourth section, in addition to a descriptive analysis of the data, we explore, by means of a model, the explanatory causes underlying the generation of technological knowledge in Spanish public universities. Lastly, we summarize the principal conclusions and implications of the results obtained.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Our attention is centered on the analysis of the capacities of universities to generate results that have the potential to be commercialized (i.e., patents). In our empirical study, we do not enter into the widely-debated question of whether universities or the patents registered by universities facilitate or significantly affect technological or economic progress; however, we include in this review a first part where we draw attention to the literature relevant to this question, since it is an argument of some relevance for a study of the capacities of these institutions to generate technological results.

The effects of universities on the economy

The last two decades have been especially prolific in empirical studies concerned with quantifying the effects of universities on the economic system. From a macroeconomic point of view, several studies have confirmed the contribution made by the stock of published knowledge to the increase of productivity (Adams, 1990). Others have quantified the impact of public expenditure on universities on the gross national product (Bergman, 1990; Martin, 1998). It is well known that the new theories of endogenous growth are based on concepts related to the development, accumulation and diffusion of knowledge (Lucas, 1988; Romer, 1990, 1994), and suggest that the externalities of technological and scientific knowledge constitute one of the principal sources of growth in the long term. From the regional perspective of these propositions, research has involved incorporating the spatial aspects of the knowledge generation process in the models of growth. The studies of Olsson and Karlsson (1997), Nijkam and Poot (1998) and Karlsson and Wei (2001), are examples of the efforts made on these lines.

Using different methodologies, microeconomic research has also made valuable contributions that examine the relationships between scientific knowledge and the development and diffusion of innovations. In this line, the studies of Mansfield (1991, 1998), Mansfield and Lee (1996) and Beise and Stahl (1999) give estimates, for particular sets of companies, of the percentage of new products and processes that have been based on recent academic research.