Kyriakos Drivas will complete his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California-Berkeley. The focus of his dissertation has been on the management of university technologies, and descriptive findings have been published by the National Academy of Sciences. He has presented at a number of conferences, acted as a reviewer for Applied Economics and European Review of Agricultural Economics. He has published on the subject of cooperatives in the Journal of Agricultural Economics and the Journal of Rural Cooperation, and on political economy/finance in Ekonomia.

Abstract: This project tries to assess the role of exclusive licensing in diffusion of academic patented inventions. The metric for follow-on research employed is the patent citations the academic patent receives. This projects tests two long standing hypotheses/beliefs that are at the core of the discussion regarding the management of academic technologies. Namely, whether exclusive licensing motivates licensees to undertake research on the academic patent and whether exclusive licensing discourages non-licensees to use the knowledge embedded in the academic patent. Results show that exclusive licensing increases licensee citations regardless of the technology field; in addition start-up licensees conduct more follow-on research than established firms licensees implying the involvement of the primary inventor in the start-up. Finally licensees acquire patents mainly in the same narrow technology field as the academic patent they build on. Moreover, we find that exclusive licensing increases non-licensee citations and therefore we conclude that this type of technology transfer functions as a signal to other firms rather as a discouraging factor. This signal may be of the quality of the patent and/or information that a competitor is working on a new research path and therefore other firms should also pursue this research agenda; we provide evidence to support the signaling explanation. We find that the increase of non-licensee citations is more prevalent for computers, communications, electronics and engineering related patents while we also find that non-licensees invent around the academic patent or use it in entirely different technology fields.