Technology Transferring Performance of Chinese Universities: Insights from Patent Licensing Data

Abstract

This paper had collected the patent licensing documents of all Chinese universities and made a comprehensive study on licensing performance. With a whole set of data from SIPO, the exact licensing frequency number and licensing propensity number of Chinese universities had been obtained for the first time. On average, 16.03 patents (6%) per university had been licensed out to the industry, which is much lower than expectations. The frequency of licensing, propensity of licensing, number of partners (licensees), number of patent stocks, local-transfer ratio and the distribution of licensing frequency in terms of university-firm distance had been obtained in details. Five hypotheses had been made to discover the variances in university licensing performance. With the ANOVA technique, five hypotheses had been confirmed within the dataset, which had revealed a significant effect of patent stocks, local economic performance, central government support, existence of TTO and local government administration on university licensing performance.