Direct and Spillover Effects of ATP-Funded Photonics Technologies

In summary, together with Uniax early investor and collaborator Neste/Panipol, patents fromTherm-O-Disc, IBM, Monsanto (plus the related citations attributed to Crosslink principals),and Eveready counted for more than half (56 of 110) of the total citations to Uniax patents.Nonetheless, as in the Displaytech case, our interviews again found little evidence amongthese main citing groups of significant economic value through the spillover of technicalinformation. In contrast with the Gemfire citations in the Displaytech case, these citingscientists were uniformly aware of the Uniax research, though in some cases not the details.As indicators, these patent citations were slightly more useful in tracking diffusion of Uniaxtechnology than for Displaytech. However the citations were not really indicators of strongidea flows, but rather acknowledgements of alternative approaches and prior art in thepatent literature. None of these top-citing organizations, except collaborating partnerNeste/Panipol, had directly used or were yet commercially pursuing Uniax-influencedtechnologies. Under licence from Uniax/DuPont, Neste’s spinoff company Panipol is sellingrelated polymer technologies. The economic value created from that licencing is directlywithin-market, and presumably was already accounted for above as part of the price DuPontpaid to acquire Uniax. Moreover, Neste was half owner of Uniax in the early to mid-1990speriod in which their Uniax citations occurred. A significant question arises here, then, ofhow to classify the boundaries of the firm in studying technology diffusion: is it technologydiffusion when the flow is to an owner?That said, even if we classify Neste as external diffusion, we again conclude that patentcitations are at best, quite a noisy proxy for technology diffusion because there wasessentially no substantive flow to any of the other top-citing organizations, except Eveready,where there was not yet measurable value because research remained exploratory. In theother cases, the citations simply helped identify research teams pursuing neighboringtechnical domains, but not those directly learning or deriving benefit.HIGH-PROFILE SCIENTISTS AS TECHNOLOGY DIFFUSION NODESIn the Displaytech case, to explore technology diffusion mechanisms we also investigatedtechnology flows through geographically and technologically clustered social ties. Werepeated this analysis for Uniax. Figure 24 is a schematic of the geographic clustering byregion or nation of the patent assignee. Ohio had the highest number of citations, 22between two different firms (Therm-O-Disc and Eveready), followed by New York, with 18among four groups (IBM, Kodak, AlliedSignal, and one unaffiliated). IBM labs are near NewYork City and Kodak is in western New York in Rochester. In first-blush contrast toDisplaytech’s diffusion nexus through the University of Colorado, these Uniax-citingorganizations were generally unrelated organizations in very different industries and thegeographic clustering apparently coincidental. What is not coincidental, however, is theseUniax-citing researchers were nearly all clustered around the general technical area ofconductive polymers, an entire field stimulated by Uniax founder and Nobel laureateHeeger’s work, and several citing groups had collaborative ties to him. So, although thecitations are geographically more diffuse than Displaytech’s, they still were clusteringtechnologically and socially around Heeger, who played a role very similar to Displaytechfounder and ferroelectric liquid crystal pioneer Clark. The high-profile scientist provided theComparison of Displaytech and Uniax 65