Do Firms Trust Universities?
Earlier this week, I attended a seminar at the London Business School by Michaël Bikard – a PhD candidate at MIT – who presented his research on technological inventions. Such inventions are, of course, often patented. Examining these patents allowed Michaël to determine on which technological breakthrough discoveries these inventions were based. Hence, these inventions are basically commercial applications of the more fundamental discoveries. Fairly regularly, a university or a firm builds on and commercializes its own discoveries but, quite often, such an organisation may also be building on the discoveries of others. That is possible because such fundamental discoveries will often be published, in academic journals such as Nature or Science, and hence are accessible to everyone. And that’s when it gets interesting; because on whose discoveries are firms more likely to build when working on applied inventions: on the discoveries of universities or of other companies? It matters wher...