Abstract
A foundational assumption of patent law is that vesting inventions with intellectual
property (IP) rights increases their commercialization. We test this foundational
assumption by examining whether IP rights on university research improve
commercialization efficiency—the productivity with which firms convert R&D into
economic value—relative to comparable knowledge disseminated via publications. Using
the full set of US public firms that patented and conducted research over the period from
1976 to 2007, we see little evidence that university research protected by IP yielded greater
commercialization efficiency than university research in the public domain. Indeed, if
anything, publications are associated with slightly higher efficiency, while stock-marketbased
value measures show positive associations for both forms of knowledge.