Growth and productive efficiency of university intellectual property licensing

Licensing activity of US universities has increased substantially in recent years. We examine this increase focusing on the 'productivity' and 'changes in productivity' of licensing activity. While it is generally acknowledged that there has been a dramatic increase in licensing, there is little understanding of the licensing process as it relates to university characteristics, nor is there evidence on the extent to which this is the result of increased resources devoted to commercialization or whether it stems from other factors. This paper employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) combined with regression analysis to examine the overall productivity of university licensing activity as well as the productivity of individual universities. We find that licensing has increased for reasons other than increases in overall university resources. Given input levels, universities are today more commercially productive than they were in the recent past; we propose reasons for this shift and analyze factors associated with the shift and factors associated with relative levels of commercialization. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.