University Autonomy, the Professor Privilege and Academic Patenting: Italy, 1996–2007

Abstract

Using data on patent applications at the European Patent Office, we search for trends in academic patenting in Italy, 1996–2007. During this time, Italian universities underwent a radical reform process, which granted them autonomy, and were confronted with a change in IP legislation, which introduced the professor privilege. We find that although the absolute number of academic patents has increased, (i) their weight on total patenting by domestic inventors has not, while (ii) the share of academic patents owned by universities has more than tripled. By means of a set of probit regressions, we show that the conditional probability to observe an academic patent has declined over time. We also find that the rise of university ownership is explained, significantly albeit not exclusively, by the increased autonomy of Italian universities, which has allowed them to introduce explicit IP regulations concerning their staff's inventions. The latter has effectively neutralized the introduction of the professor privilege.

Keywords:

• academic patenting
• university autonomy
• professor privilege

Keywords:

• I23
• O31
• O34

Notes

¹ The only exceptions were: the introduction of a legal notion of “spinoff company” in 1997; the introduction of the “professor privilege” concerning IP matters in 2001 (see Section 3.2); a short-lived provision of subsidies for the creation of technology transfer offices, from 2005 to 2007.

² We explain this oddity in two ways. First, establishing a TTO absorbs financial resources, while approving an IP regulation is inexpensive (but politically complex, as it affects the relationship between faculty and administration). In addition, TTO activities may well go beyond or not include IP management.

³ Notwithstanding this diffused criticism, the norm on the professor privilege was maintained in the new Code of Industrial Property, introduced in 2005, although with some amendments that lifted the professor privilege in case of formal collaborations between university and industry.

⁴ Ownership information dates back not to the filing or priority date of the patent, but to information contained in the 2010 edition of PatStat. This suggests that some change of property may have occurred in the meanwhile (Sterzi, 2013). Consultation of alternative sources suggests them to be around 5 per cent.

⁵ As several patents fall in more than one technological field, we keep all dummies in the regression, with no reference case.

⁶ We tried also to insert quadratic terms, but to no avail.