Effects of patent policy on innovation outputs and commercialization: evidence from universities in China

As the important source of scientific and technological innovation in China, the improvement of productivity from the patent commercialization in universities and research institutes is of great significance to the promotion of China's sustainable economic development. Despite the quantity of patent applications from universities has increased dramatically in recent years, the rate of patent commercialization is somewhat lower than we expect. The purpose of our study is to examine whether the incentive patent policy has effectively enhanced the patent outputs and commercialization of universities in China. We determine the specific patent policy based on the information collection and measure the specific effect of the patent policy by using the data of the 64 universities that were directly under the Ministry of Education from 2009 to 2015. As a result, we find that although the policy has increased a university's patent output, it does not encourage the patent's commercialization. This is because to a certain extent, the policy has a negative impact on the enthusiasm of the university patent commercialization. Therefore, we argue that patent policies focusing on the quantity in the short term can improve the innovation output but will have a negative impact on university's sustainable development in the long run.