The division of labour between academia and industry for the generation of radical inventions

The paper investigates the relationship between public research and radical technological development. This study draws on the theory of recombinant innovation and builds on two newly developed indicators of novelty that proxy different forms of radicalness, to analyse UK patents filed at the European Patent Office. It assesses whether the proximity of the invention to public research is related to a higher probability of the invention being radical. The results show that, depending on the type of novelty embodied by the radical invention (novelty in recombination or novelty in technological origin), different forms of public research output (proprietary output or open science) relate to the radicalness of invention in different ways. Moreover, these relationships are highly heterogeneous among technological sectors, and most of the proximity between codified public research and radical inventions occurs in the chemistry technology field. We provide some implications for policy.