UNIVERSITY RESEARCH, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND EUROPEAN INNOVATION SYSTEMS

By Bart Verspagen. 2006

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper surveys the literature on university patenting. From the point of view of the economic theory of patents, it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical: patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights, but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme, i.e. they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge. In the debate surrounding the so-called Bayh- Dole Act in the USA, it has, however, been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms. The first part of the paper addresses two major questions. First, what is the economic logic of Bayh-Dole, and, second, what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop? In the second part, the paper addresses the issue of whether 'Bayh-Dole-like' legislation would be beneficial for European countries. In a number of European countries, a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector. Using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six European countries, an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in Europe. Because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant, statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in Europe. The paper ends with a discussion of how this 'European practice' of university patenting affects public-private knowledge transfer in Europe, and how this compares to the effects of the Bayh-Dole Act in the USA.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57a8d628ea8c2843316767cc41653a518a68db7c

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Citations in the corpus

The nexus between science and industry: evidence from faculty inventions (2012, background): “This legal exception allowed university professors to retain ownership of the results from publicly financed research and development (Kilger and Bartenbach 2002; Verspagen 2006).”
Patent and Publication Activities of German Professors: An Empirical Assessment of Their Co-Activity (2007, background): “Geuna and Nesta (2006) and Verspagen (2006) provide surveys on university patenting under the different innovation systems in Europe.”
Academic patenting in Europe: new evidence from the KEINS database (2008, background): “Surveys of this literature have been produced by Geuna and Nesta (2006) and Verspagen (2006).4 Most recently, US researchers have also attempted to measure university-invented patents as opposed to university-owned ones.”
30 Years after Bayh-Dole: Reassessing Academic Entrepreneurship (2011, unknown): “There is also some debate regarding the contribution that the Bayh-Dole Act has made to society more generally (Verspagen, 2006).”
Universities and open innovation: the determinants of network centrality (2019, background): “3) is used to capture the extent to which innovative outputs with commercial potential are produced (Verspagen 2006).”
Commercializing academic research: the quality of faculty patenting (2011, background): “This explains why the majority of inventions (that were taken out as patents) made in German universities were not assigned to universities but to the professors themselves or to corporations (Verspagen, 2006, Geuna and Nesta, 2006, Czarnitzki et al., 2007a,b).”