Abstract

Innovation may significantly contribute to building and maintaining competitive advantage of companies. It is therefore imperative to invest in research activities which will lead to innova-tive accomplishments that can be successfully patented. However, only a small portion of these patents will ever be commercialized in the form of a new product introduction or a patent license. The main purpose of this thesis is to examine various factors which might increase the commercialization potential of the patented inventions. We investigate the impact of collabo-ration patterns of inventors and also their various individual characteristics and the attributes related to their work on the commercialization potential of the inventions. While focusing on Canadian nanotechnology innovation ecosystem we exploit the data spanning 25 years of United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO) patent documents. Based on the co-inventor-ship information captured in the patents the network of inventors’ collaborations is developed. To evaluate collaboration patterns of inventors the relevant structural properties assessing collaborative intensity and access to knowledge and ideas through the network are measured. Fur-thermore, various attributes and features of inventors related to their education, working expe-rience and to the characteristics of their workplace are collected via Google and LinkedIn. The statistical model assessing the impact of the various collaboration and individual characteristics of inventors on the commercialization potential of their inventions is then developed. The results show that those inventors who collaborate with higher number of other inventors and those who occupy more central positions in the collaboration network and thus enjoy an enhanced access to knowledge and ideas tend to produce inventions with higher commercialization potential. Moreover, the results also indicate that having graduate education in engineering and being employed in non-academic institution, especially in companies with lower number of employees are factors which may enhance the commercialization potential of the patented inventions as well.