The Role of Early Career Factors in Academic Patenting

This paper explores the characteristics of persistent academic inventors and how they are influenced by their personal attributes, PhD institution, and first invention. Using a novel dataset on 555 UK academic inventors, we find that the quality of the first invention is the best predictor for subsequent participation in the patenting process. We further find evidence for a positive training effect whereby researchers that were trained at universities that had already established commercialisation units have a higher propensity to patent persistently. In addition, researchers that gained first patenting experience in industry are able to benefit from stronger knowledge flows and receive more citations than their purely academic peers.