When Do Universities Own Their Patents? An Explorative Study of Patent Characteristics and Organizational Determinants in Germany

Abstract

University-invented patents are often not owned by the university. Empirical knowledge about factors affecting the ownership of university patents is limited and mainly focuses on patent characteristics. To study how the ownership of German university patents (2006–2007) relates to patent and university-level performance indicators, we matched PatStat data with a register of German professors. Four to five years after the abolition of the professors' privilege, universities on average owned more than half of all patents on faculty inventions. General and technical universities differ in how patent ownership relates to patent and university characteristics.

Keywords:

• academic patenting
• patent ownership
• higher education research institutions
• technical universities

Keywords:

• I23, L31, O31, O34

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for comments received from the participants at the Name Game Workshops in Brussels and Leuven as well as at the EPIP conference in Leuven. Financial support by the European Science Foundation (project ESF-APE-INV) is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ We restricted the dataset to the period 2006–2007 to be able to control for forward citations and to make sure that the sample falls in a period in which the legal reform is implemented.

² In total, 133 professors affiliated with the same university have coinvented 91 patents. To avoid double counting, we keep only distinct university-patent pairs.

³ A closer look at ownership types within the category of university-owned and university-invented patents is given in S2.

⁴ The number of claims (total or per backward citation) could alternatively be used (Harhoff et al., 2003), but it reflects idiosyncratic decisions by the author of the patent application (Reitzig, 2004).

⁵ The share of X and Y backward citations has been used as a complementary proxy for the inventive step of the invention (Czarnitzki et al., 2012). Documents categorized as X or Y are particularly relevant for the evaluation of patentability of the invention (Czarnitzki et al., 2012). As a robustness check we used the number of X and Y citations instead of the overall number of backward citations. The same was done for forward citations, for which the share of X and Y citations indicates a patent's blocking potential (cf. Hall and Harhoff, 2001; Guellec et al., 2008). In both cases, this led to similar results as those reported here (available upon request).

⁶ “Ratio of publications that an institution publishes in the most influential scholarly journals of the world, those ranked in the first quartile (25 per cent) in their categories as ordered by SCImago Journal Rank SJR indicator” (SCImago Research Group, 2012).

⁷ Ranking outcomes are available for all but two (publication ranking) and five (entrepreneurial orientation) universities.

⁸ One worrisome explanation for this difference would be that firm ownership results from successful sales of university-owned patents. Patent sales can be identified through commercial databases identifying the original applicant of the patent. In our sample, 21 university-invented patents were sold until 2011. However, only two of these patents were originally applied for by a university.