Characterizing Patenting in an Indian University System: A Case Study

Abstract

University patenting reflects on the strength of a nation’s innovation in basic research and ability to seed innovation in industry. Despite the growing support from the government for public funded universities to patent their research, university patenting in India remains a small fraction of patenting happening at other institutional sectors like government research institutions and the private sector. From the extant literature, we found that most research on university patenting was on their public and private benefits. This concern on low patenting at public funded Indian universities combined with the dearth of studies in the area led to the current study on characterizing patenting in the Indian university system, so as to understand it better, improve decision making and there by improve patenting. As the university Technology Transfer Office (TTO) and the faculty are the main stakeholders in the university patenting process from the perspective of managing the patenting activity and deciding on whether to patent or publish respectively, we chose to address objectives that improved decision making at the TTO level and the faculty level in this thesis. The thesis has five main objectives, which are as follows, 1) To perform a synthesis of university patenting by capturing its characteristics, processes involved and challenges faced 2) To conceptualize and develop an analytical framework for characterizing university patenting as an approach for improving patent management and decision making at the university 3) To evaluate multiple approaches for characterizing technology in university patents, to study their effectiveness and arrive at a refined comprehensive approach 4) To develop a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship between publications and patenting activity of faculty 5) To validate empirically the relationship between publications and patenting activity of faculty in an Indian university