infoJustice

Authors: Fen Lin and Waverly W. Ding

Abstract: Chinese universities in recent decades have experienced a wave of surging patenting activities. Is the increase in patenting activities evidence that Chinese universities have been catching up with their counterparts outside of China, or are there low-quality “patent bubbles” with the surge? Adopting three measurements of patents’ technical quality and commercial values, we analysed 769,133 invention patents granted to 538 Chinese universities by China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) from 1990 to 2019. Our analysis confirms the existence of patent bubbles in Chinese universities: growth in the number of patents granted to a university in the past three years is negatively associated with the technological quality and commercial value of the subsequent patents from the university. The magnitudes of such negative associations are non-trivial. Moreover, though the overall bubbles are more severe in non-elite than in elite universities, the severity of the bubbles grew faster after 2010 among the top-tier universities. Our empirical evidence of patent bubbles in Chinese universities suggests caution in interpreting the recent growth of innovation capacity in Chinese universities.

Citation: Lin, Fen and Ding, Waverly W. and Chen, Shi, The Patent Gold Rush? An Empirical Study of Patent Bubbles in Chinese Universities (1990-2019) (May 14, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4447754 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4447754