| Abstrakt: |
University patenting plays a crucial role in technology development. Trajtenberg, Henderson and Jaffe (1997)'s seminal work on a US-based dataset showed that university patents imply significantly more spillovers than industry patents due to a greater reliance on science and, as shown by other literature, a significantly greater knowledge disclosure. Surprisingly, only few studies dig into the differences between university and corporate patenting. In this paper, we therefore focus on the role of University patenting in the case of emerging technologies using the example of green-AI technologies -- inventions that include artificial intelligence to solve some of the Grand Challenges of the 21st century. It is an interesting case as universities are encouraged to contribute more to such technologies and companies have invested heavily in fundamental AI research. Based on an analysis of 11,502 patent families, we show that overall, Trajtenberg et al. (1997)'s findings hold in the case of this emerging field. However, we demonstrate that for these initial results to hold, the technology field needs to reach sufficient maturity and university contributions are much less in the actual state of technology emergence (i.e., within the first 15 years). We also show that the role of universities is contingent on geographical factors: it only holds for Chinese university patenting activities. Our results have substantial implications for theory and practices, notably regarding the conditions for policymakers to encourage universities to patent in an emerging phase of technology development as well as for the specific case of green-AI technologies that contribute to tackling Grand Challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
