Late-stage academic entrepreneurship: Explaining why academic scientists collaborate with industry to commercialize their patents

This study expands the scope of research on academic entrepreneurship to include academic inventors who actively engage in late-stage commercialization. It investigates post-patent involvement of academic scientists in the development of products based on their patented inventions. Using data from a 2010 national survey of 798 academic inventors listed on patents assigned to universities in 2006, our analysis shows that only 27% of the inventors were working with a company to further develop their invention for commercial use. Additionally, academic inventors who reported stronger entrepreneurial orientation, higher commercial significance of the patent, lower reliance of the patent on scientific literature, and stronger entrepreneurial disposition of their university were more likely to engage in post-patent commercial development. Our work contributes to the literature on the entrepreneurial behavior of academic scientists by further exploring a critical but relatively understudied post-invention stage of commercialization.