Mariëtte Du Plessis

Inventive Output of Academic Research: A Comparison of Two Science Systems

SummaryThis paper compares the inventive output of two science systems in small European countries. More specifically, we examine patented inventions of Finnish and Flemish university researchers. The comparison includes inventive output as such and its concentration on organizations, inventors, and corporate owners as well as foreign assignations and the degree to which individual inventors have retained the ownership of the patents. While there are commonalities between the Finnish and Flemish systems in terms of patent concentration on key institutions and corporate assignees, there are also pronounced differences with respect to the ownership structure of academic patents, which was expected in light of the different intellectual property regulations. Our observations seem to suggest that the total inventive output of a research system is not a function of the prevailing intellectual property system but rather in correspondence to overall national inventiveness thereby pointing to more general (national, cultural) drivers of academic inventive activity. From a methodological viewpoint, this research illustrates that tracing university-owned patents alone would leave considerable technological contributions of academics unidentified - also in countries where universities own the rights to their researchers’ patents. Another finding with potential methodological implications is that patents are highly concentrated on institutions. If such a distribution law applies to large countries as well, analysts could cover most of the national academic patent output by an intelligent selection of universities.

The impact of academic technology: do modes of involvement matter? The Flemish case

Patent statistics that reflect university technology development have become increasingly relevant as academia adopts entrepreneurial objectives while facing a trend toward more accountability. In this contribution, we focus on the patent activity of Flemish universities (period 1991–2001). In Flanders, university patenting has become explicitly incentivized through policy measures (1996) and more recently even resource allocation schemes are resulting in a notably high share of universities in the overall patent portfolio of the regional innovation system. As a result, one might expect inflationary effects on the level of academic patents, especially in terms of quality. In addition, we analyze whether the impact of academic patents depends on the mode of university involvement (university-invented vs university-owned). Overall, we observe a considerable increase in both types of academic patenting without any deterioration (over time) of citation rates. Moreover, our findings indicate that university-owned patents receive more forward citations than university-invented (firm-owned) patents. Combined, these findings signal that the increase of academic patent activity—stimulated by policies granting ownership rights to universities—did not coincide with a decrease in their value.