From Idea to Product - Translating Knowledge between the Lab and the Clinic

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of three essays looking at innovation at Academic Medical Centers. It tries to empirically explore the problem of translating knowledge from the laboratory bench to the clinic and from the clinic to the bench. Chapter 1, co-authored with Iain Cockburn, establishes the importance of inhouse complementary knowledge in firm decision to license an invention from an Academic Medical Center. By using patent data to describe the technology portfolio of firms who look at patents and then decide whether to license them or not we are able to provide a description of demand in Markets for Technology. We show that firms license inventions that are similar to own technology portfolio when such similarity is measured at a broad level using International Patent Classes. However, controlling for such broad level proximity, firms are less likely to license inventions that are similar when measured at a more granular level. Chapter 2 asks: “Are inventions by teams from Academic Medical Centers that combine cross-domain knowledge at a higher hazard of licensing than inventions by single domain teams?” Inventors’ educational background is used to assign them to the clinical (MDs) or the research domain (PhD). Contrary to our expectations, we find that inventions by cross-domain teams are at a lower hazard of licensing. Similarly, inventions by cross-domain integrated teams (at least one MD/PhD) are at a lower hazard of licensing than inventions by cross-domain distributed teams (MD and PhD on team but no MD/PhD). However, medical device inventions tend to be at a higher hazard of licensing if invented by cross-domain teams. Chapter 3, co-authored with Rob Huckman, looks at how the routine clinical work of cardiac surgeons at Academic Medical Centers can impact their innovative performance as measured by quantity and quality of academic articles that they publish. We use the procedures that these cardiac surgeons perform every year to create a measure of clinical focus to understand whether diversity of work impacts innovation. Using a panel data with surgeon fixed effects we find that early career surgeons benefit from work diversity but late-career surgeons do not.