Sci. Public Policy

This paper explores the importance of early-career characteristics of academic inventors and how they affect their patenting activity. Using a novel dataset on 555 UK academic inventors, we find that the quality of the first invention is the best predictor for subsequent participation in the patenting process. We further find evidence for a positive training effect whereby researchers who were trained at universities that had already established commercialisation units patent more. In addition, researchers who gained their first patenting experience in industry are able to benefit from stronger knowledge flows and receive more citations than their purely academic peers