The Determinants of National Patent ownership by Public Research Centres

Some literature has paid attention to the increase of university-owned patents in many EU countries,
following the same trend in the US. We build an indicator to compare between EU and US university-owned
patents in relative terms and both of them with public research organisations (PRO)-owned patents. We find that
EU universities have almost caught-up US universities and EU PROs in patent ownership. We conclude that the
challenge is to understand the large differences between US and EU PROs. Our econometric estimations also
show that while returns to scale are decreasing for university-owned patents, they are constant for PRO-owned
patents, and illustrate the possibility that none of them are compatible with other alternatives for technology
transfer.

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