Knowledge Spillover Effect of University-Industry Collaboration Policy: An empirical analysis of knowledge spillover effect of A-STEP program

This paper, using patent data of companies participating in the A-STEP program conducted by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) for promoting university-industry collaboration, empirically analyzes the knowledge spillover effect of the program. First, by comparing the recipient companies' patents filed in direct relation to the A-STEP program (A-STEP fruit patents) and their patents independent of the program (program-independent patents) in terms of the forward citations in the subsequent third parties' patents, no statistically significant difference is observed between them, suggesting that the program does not have any effect in promoting additional knowledge spillover. Second, for the patents in question, the number of citations by patent examiners shows a positive effect on knowledge spillover, implying that the higher the quality of the patent, the more it is cited in the subsequent third parties' patents. Third, based on the median test, the value of A-STEP patents is lower than program-independent patents in the number of claims, but higher in the number of inventors.