More Disclosure, Better Inventions? Commercial Potential in University Invention Disclosures

Abstract

Encouraging researchers to disclose inventions to Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) is central to universities’ research commercialization efforts, yet whether higher disclosure rates are associated with more commercially promising inventions entering the TTO pipeline remains unclear. We theorize four scenarios predicting different relationships between rising disclosure activity and the commercial potential of disclosed inventions. Using a novel publication-level, ex-ante measure of commercial potential based on a fine-tuned SciBERT model, applied to a unique internal disclosure dataset from a major U.S. engineering university that experienced a marked change in its disclosure environment in 2022, we find that inventions with higher commercial potential were much more likely to be disclosed, and that this sorting became substantially stronger post-2022—with the marginal effect of commercial potential on disclosure probability more than doubling. This pattern was driven by researchers whose publications had high commercial potential but who had not previously engaged with the TTO, and by star scientists who became more active disclosers.