Inventor's Knowledge Set as the Antecedent of Patent Importance

This paper investigates the antecedents of patent importance by looking at the prior knowledge set of academic inventors. Using independent methodologies, we distinguish between the scientific knowledge set and the technical knowledge set, and separate these from other kinds of prior expertise. We find that the patents of the inventors who have a prior scholarly knowledge of the topic are on average more important (more cited after 6 years). Conversely, we find an inverted U-shape relationship between prior technical relatedness and patent importance. These results are potentially useful to support the work of practitioners such as university technology managers, which often face difficulties in identifying the importance and perspective value of the disclosed inventions, amid high market and legal uncertainty and budget shortages.