Academic Patenting in Europe: New Evidence from the KEINS Database

The paper provides summary statistics from the KEINS database on academic patenting in France, Italy, and Sweden. It shows that academic scientists in those countries have signed many more patents than previously estimated. This re-evaluation of academic patenting comes by considering all patents signed by academic scientists active in 2004, both those assigned to universities and the many more held by business companies, governmental organizations, and public laboratories. Specific institutional features of the university and research systems in the three countries contribute to explain these ownership patterns, which are remarkably different from those observed in the US. In the light of these new data, European universities’ contribution to domestic patenting appears not to be much less intense than that of their US counterparts