Learning to patent: Institutional experience, learning, and the characteristics of US university patents after the Bayh-Dole Act, 1981–1992

Links between R&D in U.S. industry and research in U.S. universities have a long history, but recent developments in this relationship, especially the growth in university patenting and licensing of technologies to private firms, have attracted considerable attention. U.S. university patenting and licensing have grown significantly in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The Act's effects on U.S. research universities have been the focus of several empirical studies, which reach slightly different conclusions. The work of Henderson and colleagues finds a decline in the ‘importance’ and ‘generality’ of overall U.S. academic patenting during the 1980s.