On the way from invention to innovation: the role of applicant and inventor team characteristics

This paper investigates the impact of applicant and inventor team composition on patent commercialization in form of product creation. It outlines the importance of applicant and inventor team characteristics, i.e. specifically, size and internationality, on the speed of market authorization of a patent-related product and on the product quality. The analysis is performed for the European pharmaceutical industry. The product data is taken from the European Medicines Agency website for the period 2010-2019. Manual patent-product concordance is established with the help of the Pat-INFORMED database from the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Health Canada database. The created dataset presents combined data on patent and product characteristics. Results from an accelerated failure time model show that larger applicant teams as well as the presence of international applicants and inventors decelerate the market authorization of patent-related products. Results of the probit analysis show that larger inventor teams lead to patents of higher quality.