Licensing in the Context of Entrepreneurial University Activity: an Empirical Evidence and a Theoretical Model

US universities are leading the way in technology commercialization and licensing. This paper discusses the practice of licensing at the US universities, as well as the main directions and tasks of technology commercialization and licensing at the University of Maryland. Universities and research centers can implement steps to improve their technology commercialization and licensing negotiation by using solid analytical models. In the following sections, we suggest and describe a game-theoretic model to analyze, understand, and anticipate the behavioral profiles of inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovators on a dynamic interactive basis and in the context of a university or research center linkages with the market (of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem) in pursuit of designing an optimal (or feasibly sub-optimal) licensing contract.