The ownership of academic patents and their impact. Evidence from five European countries

The paper compares the value and impact of academic patents in five European countries with different institutional frameworks: Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. An academic patent is defined as such when at least one university professor appears among its inventors, irrespective of ownership. Most academic patents are assigned to business companies, followed by universities, public research organizations, and individual inventors. The distribution of ownership across these categories (i) differ greatly across country, due to a combination of legal norms on IP and institutional features of the university system; (ii) and it is associated with the value of patents, as measured by forward citations. Company-owned academic patents tend to be as cited as non-academic ones, while university-owned tend to be less cited. Academic patents in the Netherlands are more cited than non-academic ones, irrespective of their ownership, while university-owned patents get fewer citations in both Italy. We propose an explanation of these results based on the different autonomy enjoyed by universities in the countries considered. We also find that company-owned academic patents in Sweden get many fewer citations than non-academic. Individually-owned academic patents are more cited than non-academic patents similarly owned by their inventors.