The aim of this study is to investigate a performance of collaborative researches between academia and the pharmaceutical industry. We conduct an empirical study with a dataset of patent applications and a directory service of academic researchers. The study measures the qualities of technology development (TD) and product development (PD), by using such multiple indexes as number of citations, patent grants, and foreign applications.
The empirical results suggest that TD quality has a positive effect on PD quality, while industry-university (IU) inventions have a lower TD quality than the industry-alone inventions. In certain disease areas, however, IU inventions receive more citations than the industry-alone inventions, meaning that IU inventions enjoy better TD quality. These findings also indicate that we can expect better achievement from collaborative researches by focusing on appropriate disease areas.