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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the patenting activity of the Brazilian academic sector vis-à-vis the domestic business sector, taking into account the recent evolution of Brazil’s industrial policies. The paper differentiates between “university academic patents”, which are owned by the universities, and “non-university academic patents”, which despite being invented by academic staff are not owned by the universities.

The authors’ cross-checked information regarding the names of all inventors with Brazilian addresses in PCT patent applications in the Espacenet database with the names of researchers in the CVs available on the Lattes Platform of CNPq. The analysis specifically focussed on patent applications published in the PCT with Brazilian priority for the 2002-2012 period.

It was found that the Brazilian academic patents concentrate on science-based technology areas, especially in the Pharma Biotechnology domain. For a total of 466 patent applications with Brazilian priority in this field, 233 have academic inventors. Of those 233 academic applications, 66.1 per cent have universities as their owners, while the remaining 33.9 per cent are not owned by universities. Further, it was found that there are more Brazilian academic patents in the biotechnology sub-domain than those filed by the business sector.

This research was based on the intersection of patent databases and the content available on the official curriculum base of Brazil (Lattes Platform, CNPq). Once the curricula information are voluntary, there are risks inherent reliability of this information.

This study allows us to identify more accurately which is the effective role of the Brazilian Academy in patents generation, revealing that a significant unaccounted deposits with personal inventors or companies’ ownership really have a academic contribution.

This paper shows that the academic sector plays a key role in Brazil’s international patenting activity, particularly in science-intensive technology domains, and it highlights the specific contribution of academic patents not owned by universities.

Este trabalho apresenta a análise da atividade de patenteamento do setor acadêmico brasileiro considerando a recente evolução das políticas de promoção da inovação no Brasil. O artigo tem como base a diferenciação necessária entre “patentes acadêmicas universitárias”, que são patentes/depósitos cujos requerentes são as universidades, e as “patentes acadêmicas não-universitárias” que, apesar de ser inventadas por docentes da academia, não têm as universidades como requerentes dos depósitos.

Foram cruzadas informações de todos os inventores constantes nos pedidos de patentes de origem brasileira realizados pela via PCT, com os nomes dos pesquisadores com currículos disponíveis na Plataforma Lattes do CNPq. A análise incidiu sobre pedidos de patentes publicado na via do PCT com prioridade brasileira para o período 2002-2012 contidos no banco de dados do Espacenet.

Verificou-se que as patentes acadêmicas brasileiras se concentram em áreas mais tecnológicas, especialmente no domínio de Farmácia-Biotecnologia. Para um total de 466 pedidos de patentes com prioridade brasileiros neste setor, 233 tinham inventores acadêmicos. Destes 233 pedidos acadêmicos, 66.1% têm suas universidades como titulares ou co-titulares, enquanto os restantes 33.9% não são de propriedade das universidades. Verificou-se ainda que existem mais patentes no sub-domínio de biotecnologia depositadas pelo setor acadêmico brasileiro do que aquelas requeridas pelo setor empresarial privado.

Neste artigo, demonstrou que a academia desempenha um papel ainda mais expressivo na atividade de patenteamento internacional do Brasil, particularmente em domínios de tecnologia intensivos em ciência, e destaca a contribuição específica das “patentes acadêmicas não-universitárias”, que possuem origem lastreada pelos pesquisadores da academia.

Academic entrepreneurship is extremely relevant in knowledge and technology transfer (KTT). The purpose of this study is to provide insights into phase-specific constraints and needs impacting scientists’ engagement in entrepreneurial activities at public research institutions.

In an exploratory case study, 40 qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with German academic entrepreneurs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Based on the data analysis, an ideal-typical founding process with phase-specific barriers and needs was identified. Many constraints and associated needs occur in more than one phase, including the lack of knowledge, the demand for exchange formats, the lack of time and financial resources, institutionalized return options, the lack of human resources and the lack of incentives.

Given its exploratory approach, this study has limitations regarding its generalization; however, the presented findings may induce further research and in-depth analysis on this matter.

Several recommendations for action are provided for each phase of the founding process to strengthen the (entrepreneurial) transfer in research organizations. Generally, a pioneering indicator of excellence in the science system should be developed to promote transfer next to publications.

The study contributes to existing literature on determinants of academic entrepreneurship by indicating the phase-specific constraints and needs throughout the founding process and discussing those needs in the theoretical context of current societal and technological mega-trends.

This paper examines the relationship between the originality of a pharmaceutical innovation and its patent quality. Greater patent quality has been shown in the extant literature to enhance market value, which better enables firms to recoup research and development (R&D) expenditures incurred during the innovation process. Understanding how originality improves patent quality can assist policymakers, when determining the optimal length of pharmaceutical patent protection and/or market exclusivity.

The relationship between originality and patent quality is empirically investigated using a tobit, as well as a zero-inflated negative binomial, estimation approach to account for prevalence of patents receiving zero forward citations. Moderating effects of joint innovation, innovation by a university researcher and innovation by an established innovator on originality are also considered.

There is a robust and positive relationship between patent originality and quality in the pharmaceutical sector. This relationship is positively moderated by joint patent ownership with a university. As such, innovators that target originality in new drug development (especially those collaborating with universities) should, according to extant literature, see greater increases in their market value.

Policymakers can use information on the originality of a new drug to discern the optimal length of market exclusivity needed to enable the innovator to recoup expenditures related to R&D. Better predictions of the timing for which firms can recoup R&D expenditures will equip policymakers with knowledge about the appropriate timing to introduce competition into the market, which is critical to reducing the price of pharmaceuticals to consumers.

Global technological competition has made technology transfer from academia to firms an important public policy issue (Rahm, 1994). Academia and individual academic institutions are a primary source of new knowledge production and innovation (Brennan & McGowan, 2007). It is widely acknowledged that the commercialization of scientific and technological knowledge produced in public funded research institutions, including universities and research centres, into the marketplace have a fundamental role to play in wealth creation, supporting economic growth and technological innovation, and plays a significant role in new venture creation, growth of existing firms, and new job creation (Mansfield, 1991; Harmon et al., 1997; Ndonzuau, Pirnay, & Surlemont, 2002; Siegel, Waldman, Atwater, & Link, 2003b; Steffensen, Rogers, & Speakman, 1999; Walter, Auer, & Ritter, 2006; Perez & Sanchez, 2003). Research by Acs, Audretsch, and Feldman (1992), Jaffe (1989), Mansfield (1991, 1998), and others indicates that technological change in important segments of the economy has been significantly based on knowledge that spin-off from academic research.

Invocations of pure and applied science journals in the Web were analysed, focussing on commercial sites, in order to assess whether the Web can yield useful information about university‐industry knowledge transfer. On a macro level, evidence was found that applied research was more highly invoked on the non‐academic Web than pure research, but only in one of the two fields studied. On a micro level, instances of clear evidence of the transfer of academic knowledge to a commercial setting were sparse. Science research on the Web seems to be invoked mainly for marketing purposes, although high technology companies can invoke published academic research as an organic part of a strategy to prove product effectiveness. It is conjectured that invoking academic research in business Web pages is rarely of clear commercial benefit to a company and that, except in unusual circumstances, benefits from research will be kept hidden to avoid giving intelligence to competitors.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether the entrepreneurial activities of universities in the UK can be statistically grouped together.

This paper is performing a principal component analysis (PCA) of the 2009/2010 UK Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey (HE-BCIS) data for the third stream activities of universities in the UK.

The PCA of the 144 included institutions identified four groups of entrepreneurial activities being engaged in by universities in the UK. Three of the four groups were related to spin-offs, labelled as “Staff Spin-off Activity”, “Non-HEI Owned Spin-Off Activity” and “Graduate Start-up Activity”. The remaining factor has been named “University Knowledge Exploitation Activity (UKEA)” and encompasses a wide range of university knowledge creation, exchange and exploitation activities.

The research indicates, through a ranking system for each university for the various groups of entrepreneurial activities, that universities are often entrepreneurial in just one or two of the groups of entrepreneurial activities identified by the PCA. Identifying what is causing those differences is required to further understand why we see this variation across the HE sector.

The use of a PCA to identify groups of entrepreneurial activities is a novel approach. Typically studies use a select few indicators, such as spin-offs or patents to analyse the entrepreneurial activities of universities. This study uses PCA to group together statistically related activities which can then be used to identify what is driving these groups of activities in future studies.

Different mechanisms allow intellectual capital (IC) to affect performance. This paper aims to analyze the value of relations for the academic performance effect of IC and explore how the university’s reliance on digital technologies facilitates the contribution of IC to the overall academic performance.

The authors develop a model linking elements of IC to academic performance in the form of teaching, research and entrepreneurial activity. The model is centered on relational capital (RC) that is supposed to directly fuel performance and mediate the link between the other two IC dimensions and performance. From a methodological point of view, the authors base the empirical investigation on a sample of Italian public universities and applied structural equation modeling to test the mediation and a group comparison to disentangle the effect of universities’ digitalization.

The authors find a significant and positive effect of RC on performance. RC fully mediates the relationship between structural capital and academic performance, whereas it only partially mediates the link between human capital and academic performance. The authors also suggest that digital technologies guide the prominence of the relationship in the university’s ability to fulfill teaching, research and entrepreneurship missions through IC.

This study offers a representation of how the relational dimension of IC is the mean through which the stock of knowledge inside IC can be translated into entrepreneurial, education and research achievements and how digital technologies are essential for the exploitation of the performance effect of IC in the digital era.

This chapter provides an overview of the findings and chapters of a thematic volume in the International Perspectives on Education and Society (IPES) series. It describes the common dataset and methods used by an international research team.

The chapter synthesizes the results of a series of country-level case studies and cross-national and regional comparisons on the growth of scientific research from 1900 until 2011. Additionally, the chapter provides a quantitative analysis of global trends in scientific, peer-reviewed publishing over the same period.

The introduction identifies common themes that emerged across the case studies examined in-depth during the multi-year research project Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research and Development and the Knowledge Society (SPHERE). First, universities have long been and are increasingly the primary organizations in science production around the globe. Second, the chapters describe in-country and cross-country patterns of competition and collaboration in scientific publications. Third, the chapters describe the national policy environments and institutionalized organizational forms that foster scientific research.

The introduction reviews selected findings and limitations of previous bibliometric studies and explains that the chapters in the volume address these limitations by applying neo-institutional theoretical frameworks to analyze bibliometric data over an extensive period.

Growth in scientific production and productivity over the 20th century resulted significantly from three major countries in European science – France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Charting the development of universities and research institutes that bolster Europe’s key position in global science, we uncover both stable and dynamic patterns of productivity in the fields of STEM, including health, over the 20th century. Ongoing internationalization of higher education and science has been accompanied by increasing competition and collaboration. Despite policy goals to foster innovation and expand research capacity, policies cannot fully account for the differential growth of scientific productivity we chart from 1975 to 2010.

Our sociological neo-institutional framework facilitates explanation of differences in institutional settings, organizational forms, and organizations that produce the most European research. We measure growth of published peer-reviewed articles indexed in Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE).

Organizational forms vary in their contributions, with universities accounting for nearly half but rising in France; ultrastable in Germany at four-fifths, and growing at around two-thirds in the United Kingdom. Differing institutionalization pathways created the conditions necessary for continuous, but varying growth in scientific production and productivity in the European center of global science. The research university is key in all three countries, and we identify organizations leading in research output.

Few studies explicitly compare across time, space, and different levels of analysis. We show how important European science has been to overall global science production and productivity. In-depth comparisons, especially the organizational fields and forms in which science is produced, are crucial if policy is to support research and development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the survival of university spin-offs (USOs) in Spain. First, the survival rates of USOs are compared with those of a group of similar firms. Second, the firm-specific characteristics of surviving USOs are compared with those of failed USOs.

The study is based on two subsamples consisting of 469 USOs and 469 non-USOs. A matching procedure is used for identifying a valid control group that allows for an outcome comparison between USOs and non-USOs. A longitudinal data set (2000-2010) is constructed, combining data regarding firm-specific characteristics and patent activity. The survival rates of both USOs and non-USOs are described first, and then, the firm-specific characteristics of the surviving USOs are discussed and compared with those of the failed USOs.

The authors find that the survival rates of the USOs are slightly lower than those of the non-USOs. In addition, the failed USOs have a longer average life span than the failed non-USOs. Finally, the data show that the surviving USOs are more likely to have venture capital investors, exports and patents than the failed USOs.

This study carries out an explanatory analysis of the survival of Spanish USOs. As the results showed no significant differences between the characteristics of the surviving USOs and those that failed, except for subtle differences in the profiles of the two groups, it is necessary to analyse the underlying causes of this situation.

In many countries, large amounts of public funds have been invested in the creation of USOs. This policy only makes sense if these firms increase the business value and create jobs. The support of USOs with a low expectation of survival or economic viability opens a debate on the amount of public funds invested in these firms. In the current context, funding obtained by these companies could be considered to drain resources from those projects that really deserve to be targeted.

The creation of USOs has become a mainstay of universities’ entrepreneurship strategies. Analysing USOs’ survival is therefore crucial for understanding the contribution of entrepreneurial universities to society. Survival is not another measure of this performance, but it is a pre-condition for university-based entrepreneurship to have an effect on society.