Academic inventors as brokers: An exploratory analysis of the KEINS database.

Academic inventors are university scientists who appear as designated inventors of patents whose assignee may be either a business company, their own academic institution, or a governmental administration. The paper analyses their relationships entertained with co?inventors, who may be either academic colleagues, students, or, very often, industrial researchers. Gould’s and Fernandez’s (1989) definition of “brokerage” roles is adjusted to patent data, and complemented with information drawn from the academic inventors’ publications and their answers to a short questionnaire. Only very few academic inventors are found to hold brokerage positions. Those who do have a large number of patents, a strong publication record and higher?than?average propensity to keep in touch with their business co?inventors after patents, for information exchanges of all sorts. Some of them achieve influence well beyond the walls of the Ivory Tower.