Institutional changes and the commercialization of academic knowledge: A study of Italian universities’ patenting activities between 1965 and 2002

Research Policy 35 (2006) 518–532

Institutional changes and the commercialization of academic knowledge: A study of Italian universities’ patenting activities between 1965 and 2002夽 Nicola Baldini, Rosa Grimaldi, Maurizio Sobrero ∗ Department of Management, University of Bologna, Via Capo di Lucca 34, 40126 Bologna, Italy Received 3 March 2004; received in revised form 1 December 2005; accepted 30 January 2006 Available online 31 March 2006

Abstract This paper focuses on Italian universities’ patenting activities between 1965 and 2002 and on the way they were affected by internal IPR regulations, set as part of broader responses to the increased level of autonomy granted to universities during the 1990s. Our analyses are based on a unique dataset including detailed information on all patents filed by Italian universities and university-level characteristics. Results show that: (1) in the last 10 years, the number of Italian university patents rose substantially; (2) patenting activities almost tripled in universities with an internal IPR regulation, after controlling for several universities’ characteristics, previous patenting activity and time trends; (3) each time a university creates its own patent regulation, there is a 9% increase in the likelihood that universities without any internal patent regulation will adopt one. Implications for university technology transfer policies are discussed. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: University; Patents; Regulations; Technology transfer; Organizational change

1. Introduction Since the late 1960s, universities have been considered as institutions devoted to the creation and diffusion of knowledge as a public good, mainly through research and education, thus performing a key role for their countries’ economic and scientific growth (Mansfield, 1991; Rosenberg and Nelson, 1994). More recently a new stream of research has focused on technology transfer by

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Previous versions of this paper were presented at the XIV Annual Meeting of the Italian Engineering Management Association (Bergamo, 30–31 October 2003) and at the EIASM Workshop on the Process of Reform of the University across Europe (Siena, 24–26 May 2004). ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 051 2098076; fax: +39 051 2098074. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Sobrero). 0048-7333/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2006.01.004

universities. Empirical analyses have focused primarily on the U.S. and have examined different forms of technology transfer such as patents (Henderson et al., 1998), academic start-ups (Shane, 2004), technology transfer office’s (TTO) activities (Thursby et al., 2001), incubators (Mian, 1996) and university–industry research collaborations (Shane, 2002). In the last few years, some studies on European universities have started to appear, offering interesting opportunities for a better understanding of universities’ technology transfer dynamics in countries characterized by important differences in the way public research systems are structured. Among these issues, which are at the heart of the current political debate on the role of academia (The Economist, 2004), there are the role and forms of universities’ governance structures (Goldfarb and Henrekson, 2003), the rules governing the

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labour markets of university researchers (Henrekson and Rosenberg, 2001), the role and characteristics of complementary institutions and mechanisms that are important for successful technology transfer activities to take place, likewise financial markets and intellectual property (IP) systems (OECD, 2003). In this paper we assess the impact of internal intellectual property right (IPR) regulations on Italian universities’ patenting activities. Such regulations are an organizational response to an exogenous institutional change enforced through a major set of reforms – aimed at increasing universities’ autonomy from the central government – introduced during the early 1990s. After a description of the Italian institutional and legislative context and the changes introduced in the 1990s, we present and discuss the organizational responses of universities by the adoption of internal regulations on IPRs. Following similar studies on the Bayh-Dole Act in the U.S. (e.g. Henderson et al., 1998; Mowery et al., 2002), we investigate the consequences of these institutionaland organizational-level changes on university patenting activity. The empirical analysis is based on the complete set of 637 patent applications filed at the Italian Patent and Trademark Office (UIBM), the European Patent Office (EPO), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) or submitted to a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) procedure between 1965 and 2002, with at least one applicant belonging to the official list of higher education institutions of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (hereinafter, MIUR). Our findings show that: (1) in the last 10 years the number of Italian university patent applications, in Italy and/or abroad, rose substantially; (2) patenting activities almost tripled in universities with an internal IPR regulation, after controlling for several universities’ characteristics, previous patenting activity and time trends; (3) each time a university creates its own patent regulation, there is a 9% increase in the likelihood that universities without any internal patent regulation will adopt one. Moreover, consistently with previous studies on academic patenting, we find that larger universities patent more, and that patenting activities are greater in the North of Italy where there is a higher level of industrial development. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we introduce the theoretical foundations to analyze the effect of institutional changes on the commercialization of academic research results. In Section 3 we focus attention on Italian legislative changes in university and patent laws, and we examine the patterns of diffusion of internal patent regulations. In Section 4 we present the

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research design and discuss the data collection procedure and the econometric models used for the estimates. Section 5 is dedicated to the empirical analysis. We then conclude in Section 6 by discussing the policy implications and the limitations of our research. 2. Institutional changes and the commercialization of academic research results At present, there is a diffused agreement in different parts of the world on the role that universities have in the exploitation and commercialization of applications based on knowledge produced in their research facilities. Historically, a reconceptualization of the role of public research systems started during the late 1970s in the U.S., following a growing concern about the apparent deterioration of the national comparative advantage in high technology (Coriat and Orsi, 2002). A set of reforms, targeted to improve the transfer of research results to industry, affected universities in different ways. First of all, specific expectations about the direct contributions of academic institutions to economic growth emerged, with particular attention paid to the local industrial environment (David, 1994). Second, a reform relating to the patentability of federally funded research was passed (Coriat and Orsi, 2002). Third, these greater pressures and incentives stimulated the creation of new organizational units within universities specifically dedicated to technology transfer activities. Also, all such changes occurred during a period of decreasing public funding, largely due to cuts in research budget, following the end of the so-called Cold War (Feller, 1990). Starting from the early 1990s, structural changes in the external environment pushing for a more active role of universities in technology transfer took place in Europe, too. Firstly, due to changes in the modes of allocation of public funds and to government budget constraints following enforcement of the Maastricht criteria for joining the common European currency, science funding entered a period of constant or shrinking budgets (Geuna, 2001). This resource constraint increased the sensibility towards alternative and complementary strategies for raising funds. Secondly, this shortage of public funding allocations has been coupled, in some European nations, with a reform of the public sector as a whole and of National Innovation Systems in particular (Etzkowitz et al., 2000). Thirdly, and more recently, some European countries such as Denmark, Germany, Austria and Norway reformed their IP laws to grant IPRs to universities (OECD, 2003), and others are considering similar reforms.

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Within this set of articulated, widespread and profound changes in the characteristics of the external environment and resource endowments, the concept of entrepreneurial university has gained increasing attention (Etzkowitz, 1998; Etzkowitz et al., 2000). Different studies have described a multiplicity of ways by which universities can benefit from technology transfer activities (for a review, see McMillan and Hamilton, 2003), ranging from: direct access to industry facilities, laboratories and industrial know-how (Grimaldi and von Tunzelmann, 2002); the possibility of having new ideas for further research activities from industrial applications; gaining the financial revenues associated with licensing activities and the commercialization of high-level consulting services; making the capital gains from academic start-ups (AUTM, 2003); entrepreneurs financing further research at universities from which they originally spun-off (Guy and Quintas, 1995); to the reinforcement of campus reputations for excellence, thus contributing to the recruitment of the smartest students and the brightest faculty (Florida, 1999). In order to address all these issues, the main general theme of IPRs within public institutions has emerged as a specific area of attention, both within the research community and among policymakers. In the next section we describe the main results emerging from studies, conducted in different countries, on academic patenting activities. 2.1. The increasing attention to academic patents The increasing attention paid by universities to technology transfer has been paired with the legislative and organizational changes necessary to create the conditions for an effective commercialization of research results through patents. In the U.S. the turning point is considered to have been the approval of the BayhDole Act in 1980, which was a piece of legislation that directly addressed this specific problem. In other countries, however, the increased opportunities available to universities are less clearly visible in the light of more general reforms. This is the case, for example, in the reform of the whole academic system introduced in the U.K. and in the Netherlands during the 1990s, the so called Loi All`egre of 1999 in France, the effort put forth by the Government in Sweden since the beginning of the 1980s, and the transfer of several powers from the central government to universities in Italy that we examine in this paper. Henderson et al. (1998) first analyzed these changes using USPTO data from between 1965 and 1988, showing that university patents increased 15-fold while real

university research spending almost tripled. However Sampat et al. (2003) show that, after controlling for possible right-censoring biases, university patents remain significantly more highly cited than non-university ones, after controlling for patent classes and year of application. They therefore reject the conclusion of a negative impact of the Bayh-Dole Act on university research quality, as measured through university patent citations. Using a different approach, Lach and Schankerman (2003) show that royalty shares have a positive and significant incentive effect on licence revenues for both public and private universities. Despite a growing attention to the problem, with the exception of the U.S., patent policies at the university level are still fairly unknown to researchers and the exploitation of academic knowledge is still low (OECD, 2003). This is probably due to the lack of adequate incentives and mechanisms and/or to their too recent introduction. In Table 1 we present data from the OECD licensing survey in 2001. Data refer to both universities and public research organizations (PROs), if not stated differently, and they offer an articulated picture of the output of technology transfer activities. Some country-level studies also started to appear in Europe, mainly describing the patenting activities in European countries, and looking at the differences in the institutional context with the U.S. Works by Balconi et al. (2003b) on Italy, Meyer (2003) on Finland and Saragossi and van Pottelsberghe (2003) on Belgium underline the way that many inventions that are developed within universities are patented by other institutions. This may be the case even if the universities are legally allowed to retain IPRs on such inventions, indicating that European universities might have a lower bargaining power with respect to industry, as compared with U.S. universities. In the only study (that we know of) using a comparative perspective, Cesaroni and Piccaluga (2003) analyzed the patenting activity of Italian, French and Spanish universities and other PROs at the EPO and USPTO, showing that patent policies are among the determinants of intercountry and inter-organizational differences. The studies that we have reviewed here present two interesting commonalities. They show the important role that institutional and organizational changes have in addressing and influencing academic patenting activities and their evolutionary patterns. Also, they document variations in how each university approached the exogenous environmental changes and reacted by putting in place internal organizational changes. In the following section we will focus on the Italian context. First, we summarize major legislative changes that occurred in Italy and that profoundly affected the

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Table 1 Commercialization of public research in some OECD countries in 2001 Country

Patent stock

Patent applications

Active licences

Gross income (Thousands)

Start-ups

Ownership of IPRs

Australia Belgiuma Germanyb Italyd Japand Norwayb Netherlandsd Russia Switzerland South Korea Spain United Statesd

– 506 5404 – 682 114 991 – 1184 9391 781 –

834 121 1058 1902 567 43 212 1712 175 1692 133 8294

417 46 555 362 89 22 368 206 475 247 125 7056

US$ 99525 240D 66368D – 1397D 7700D 11400c D 1375D 5650D US$ 3822 961D US$ 1367052c

47 15 37 36 6 51 37 15 68 56 11 390

University/PRO University/PRO University/PRO Inventor Inventor University/PRO University/PRO Government University/PRO University/PRO University/PRO University/PRO

Source: OECD (2003). a Only Flanders. b Only PROs. c Estimates. d Year 2000.

universities’ autonomy. We then turn our attention to the internal IPR regulations adopted by Italian universities in the last decade and to how they diffused within the country. 3. Changes in the Italian institutional context and the emergence of university-level IPR regulations 3.1. Law 168/1989 and related reforms The Italian university system has for long been a typical example of a fully public and highly centralized governance structure, with low autonomy at the university level and a key role played by the state. In 1989, Law 168 endorsed the self-regulation principle and increased the universities’ administrative autonomy. This new institutional framework was further elaborated by Law 537/1993, which introduced greater freedom for universities in the use of funds coming from the Ministry and the possibility of attracting external funding. Following the Decreto Ministeriale 9th February 1996 that gave full application to Law 168/1989, universities started to elaborate their own statutes and internal regulations, which gradually expanded to include different possibilities for leveraging their internal resources and competences. Considering the existing limitations on student fees, which overall cannot exceed 20% of the total funding coming from government, external fundraising and technology transfer activities become the only sources for universities to increase their income. Law 168/1989 did not affect the rights and duties of university researchers relating to patents, which were

still governed by a 1939 law, according to which IPRs on employees’ inventions were granted to the employer, with inventors deserving a reward for their activities. In 2001, however, the newly elected Government, under the assumption that individual inventors would have been in a better position to profit from their discoveries and that universities lacked the competences and the culture to promote patenting, introduced the so called “academic privilege”. Under the new Law 383/2001, while IPRs on private employees’ inventions were still granted to the employer, IPRs on public employees’ inventions were now granted to the employees themselves; this law moved in the opposite direction with respect to the recent European mainstream (OECD, 2003). At the same time, universities and PROs were entitled to receive between 30% and 50% of the net revenues coming from the commercial exploitation of the patented inventions. Since the introduction of this law, all the actors involved have argued for its elimination, claiming that it discriminated between private and public employees, it increased complexity and uncertainty in IPR negotiations on joint private–public projects, and provided no incentives for universities and PROs to manage strategically inventions developed in their labs. Thus, the new IP law (approved 23rd December 2004) reversed Law 383 for inventions, made by public employees, arising from research financed at least partially by the private sector, or stemming from specific research projects funded by public organizations other than the inventors’ organization(s), by granting IPRs on such inventions to the public employers rather than the employees.

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3.2. The emergence of IPR regulations within universities Given the changes in the set of norms and rules governing universities’ activities and public researchers’ patenting rights, it is interesting to examine the evolution at the university level of internal patent regulations, which define the rules for academics willing to patent their inventions. IPR regulations started to be introduced in Italian universities in 1993. They describe the steps inventors have to take to patent their inventions, the mechanisms for deciding to file a patent application, the duties and benefits for the employer and employees, the royalty scheme, and which party bears the costs of filing the patent application and controls the licensing process. To collect detailed information on all patent regulations adopted by Italian universities we started from the complete list of higher education institutions approved by MIUR in 2003. The list included 69 universities, 3 polytechnics and 3 scuola.1 Eleven universities did not have any scientific (Physics, Natural Sciences, Medicine, etc.) or technical schools (Engineering, Computer Science, Architecture, etc.) and therefore are not likely to be involved in patenting activities. In fact, they never introduced any patent regulations, nor applied for a patent. We therefore excluded them from the analysis and focused our attention on the remaining 58 universities, 3 polytechnics and 3 scuola. From here onwards, we will refer to all 64 of them simply as universities. For each one of them we relied on different sources (i.e. websites, direct interviews, internal documentation, etc.) to gather a copy of the current internal patent regulation, if adopted, and previous versions, if any. We collected all the information and data into a database called REGUNIT.2 Since 26th November 1993, when the University of Florence adopted its own provisional patent regulation, 31 universities among the 64 of our sample had adopted an internal patent regulation by the end of 2003, while 18 were in the process of developing one. Fig. 1 shows the cumulative distribution for the introduction of internal patent regulations.

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Polytechnics are universities granting degrees only in the engineering and architecture areas. “Scuola” are high-prestige organizations offering doctoral programs with only post-graduate courses. We prefer to use the Italian name because the most obvious translation in English, i.e. school, is usually thought to be a subset of a university that grants degrees only in a homogeneous scientific area, which in Italian are called “Facolt`a”. 2 More detailed information on the REGUNIT database and its characteristics are reported in Baldini et al. (2004).

Fig. 1. Cumulative number of Italian universities that have adopted a patent policy. Source: our elaborations on database REGUNIT.

4. Research design We now turn our attention to Italian universities’ patenting activities between 1965 and 2002, and analyze the impact that the institutional and organizational changes had on such activities. As an anchor point of institutional change we take 1996, the year of approval of the D.M. giving full application to Law 168/1989. As an anchor point of organizational change we take the year of adoption of a university-level patent regulation. While the 1996 law is taken as an exogenous and fixed event for all universities, the year of adoption of an internal patent regulation differs across universities. We assess the impact of the adoption by universities of patent regulations on their patenting activities, controlling for other specific university-level characteristics. Second, we analyze major factors influencing the likelihood of adoption of such regulations. Below, we present the data collected and illustrate the methods. 4.1. Data 4.1.1. Italian universities’ patents We constructed a comprehensive database (PATUNIT) holding all patent applications filed by Italian universities, either in Italy or abroad, between 1965 and 2002, using publicly available official sources administered by different patent offices. Data on Italian applications were gathered from the National Patent Database, accessible through the PATLIB centres of Italian Chambers of Commerce. Also, we queried the EPO (http://register.epoline.org/espacenet/ep/en/srchreg.htm), USPTO (http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index. html), and World Intellectual Property Organization online databases (http://ipdl.wipo.int). Due to the 18-month lag between the filing and the publication date, the last complete year of observation is 2002.

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Data were obtained by querying the patent databases in the applicant field, using as key-words: “universita” (i.e. university), “politecnico” (i.e. polytechnic) and “scuola”. Each record extracted was examined to check if the applicant field contained one of 63 universities.3 Considering that the lag between filing and granting dates is between 2 and 3 years, and in order to have homogeneous data, we rely on published applications,4 as in many studies using EPO data (e.g. Balconi et al., 2004; Carayol and Matt, 2004; Saragossi and van Pottelsberghe, 2003), thus potentially overestimating the effective patent pool. From now onwards we will refer to any record contained in the PATUNIT database simply as a patent. A careful analysis of titles and inventors showed that, if an invention appears in two or more of our sources, the first application filed is cited as a ‘priority’ in the subsequent filings. We avoided double counting by considering only patents that do not cite any ‘priorities’; when priorities were cited in a patent application, we excluded them, and considered only priority patents. For each of our 637 records, we gathered information on the assigned number, date and place of filing, the date and the number of the patent (if granted), title, applicants, inventors, principal sub-sector of IPC (International Patent Classification), application and publication numbers of the extensions (if any). 4.1.2. University-level characteristics Several university-level characteristics have been highlighted in previous studies as critical in influencing universities’ patenting activities. The first variable is represented by universities’ size, which we measure through the Fondo di Finanziamento Ordinario (FFO), 3 Patents invented at the University Vita e Salute of Milan are filed by the Foundation Centro San Raffaele del Monte Tabor. The foundation controlling both the university and San Raffaele hospital of Milan (active since the 1970s) retains IPRs on inventions and has a patenting tradition that precedes the creation of the university in 1998, therefore it is not possible to distinguish patents originating from research performed within the university from those originating from researches performed in the hospital, or jointly; thus we decided to exclude the University Vita e Salute from our analyses. 4 As for the USPTO, since it publishes patent applications only after 15th March 2001, our dataset includes only USPTO granted patents before that date. This might eventually affect the results of our analyses, as an increase in the overall number of patents could be due to the shift from USPTO granted patents to USPTO patent applications. This is not the case, however, as we counted that all of the USPTO patent applications after 15th March 2001, except two, are extensions or priorities of other patents, and therefore they are present in at least one other of our data sources. We thank one of the referees for asking us to clarify this very important point.

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representing the budget transfer from the central government to each university. It is almost entirely (82–83%) devoted to covering salaries and it accounts for about 90% of the total operating budget of universities. We collected the yearly amount of FFO that universities of our sample received, between 1994 and 2002, from the National Evaluation Committee of the University System (www.cnvsu.it). Several studies on university–industry relationships point to the relevance of the surrounding industrial environment, which acts a complement to academic research (e.g. Agrawal and Henderson, 2002; Balconi et al., 2003a,b for the Italian case). We therefore control for the geographical location of universities with a dummy variable, SOUTH, equal to 1 for universities located in the following southern regions, which are characterized by a lower level of industrial development: Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Apulia, Sardinia and Sicily. The variable is equal to 0 for universities located in all other regions. Within the U.S. academic system, the presence of a medical school is particularly relevant in explaining the overall increasing trend in academic patenting (e.g. Mowery et al., 2002; Trune and Goslin, 2000). Accordingly, we set a dummy variable (MED), which is equal to 1 for universities having a medical school, and 0 otherwise. Moreover, it has been observed that patenting is a cumulative process, where learning effects occur and reinforce institutional attention to IPRs. Therefore, we controlled for previous performance of universities in patenting activities. Finally, our data refer to patents applied for by universities. However, it is likely that professors are inventors of patents applied for by industrial partners or by other PROs. Indeed, Balconi et al. (2003b) document that Italian professors working at universities in the year 2000 appeared as inventors of more than 3% of all EPO patents having at least one Italian inventor, and of 10% of high tech patents registered from 1980 to 1999. Their analyses are based on the EPO-INVDOC database, containing all EPO patent applications invented by individuals that were professors of Italian universities on 30th October 2000. We use the EPOINV-DOC database to control for previous patenting experience at the inventor-level. 4.2. Methods In our critical-event analysis, we take the publication of D.M. 9th February 1996 as an anchor point of institutional change and we split our database in two groups of patents, relating to applications filed before and after

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1996. As for organizational change, critical events are represented by the year in which each university first introduced a patent regulation. More specifically, for each university we divide our dataset in two groups of patents: those for which applications had been filed when a university-level regulation was available (“regulated”) and those for which applications had been filed in the absence of any university-level patent regulation (“non-regulated”). We then use t-tests to examine the differences in the number of university patents after these two events, if any, and linear contrasts to analyze time trends before and after the critical events, with moving time windows to control for possible biases arising from the choice of the period of observation. After the univariate analysis, we perform two complementary multivariate analyses. The first one is focused on a longitudinal account of the factors affecting Italian universities’ patenting activities, where the dependent variable is the annual count of the number of patent applications filed by each university in each year. The period of observation is limited to 1994–2002 due to our variable proxying universities’ size (FFO), which is only available from 1994. Data for five universities is missing, and six universities were created during the period of observation, thus generating an unbalanced panel with a total number of 493 cases. Considering that the dependent variable is a count variable that takes only integer and positive values, we specify the following negative binomial model: Pi,t = exp(γUi,t + δKi,t−1 + βREGi,t−1 + αTIMEt + εi,t ) where Pi,t is the number of patents applications of university i in year t, Ui,t is a control vector of university characteristics, Ki,t−1 is a vector including information on previous university patenting activities as well as inventors’ patenting activities, REGi,t−1 is a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if university i has adopted a patent regulation in year t − 1 or before, and 0 otherwise; and finally TIME is a variable measuring the year of observation in order to capture other non observed time-specific factors. Considering the nature of the dependent variable, the characteristics of our sample and those of our model, we used generalized estimating equations (GEE) with a negative binomial distribution and a log-linear link function (Liang and Zeger, 1986). We selected an unstructured correlation specification because examination of the data revealed no regularity in the correlation pattern. We decided not to employ fixed effects models as suggested by Hausman et al. (1984) because they typically cannot

estimate effects for samples including cases for which there is no variation in the dependent variable over time. About 20% of our reduced sample of 58 universities falls into this category. Because universities not engaged in patenting activities at all may be systematically different from those in which at least one patent has been applied for, the elimination of these observations (which would enable the use of the fixed-effects model) would be likely to bias the estimates in the regression analysis. Estimating our regressions using a GEE specification with an unstructured correlation pattern enabled us to include universities that did not patent during the observation period, without invoking the random effects assumption that errors are uncorrelated between years. Moreover, we are able to estimate the two time-invariant dummy variables, MED and SOUTH, included in the Ui,t control vector of university characteristics. Robust variance estimators were used in order to reduce problems associated with misspecification of the error structure (Huber, 1967; White, 1981). The second analysis is focused on the adoption of internal IPR regulations and is based on a discrete-time event history analysis of patent regulation adoption. We observed our sample of 9 years, using 1-year time intervals, starting in 1995 and ending in 2003 (again because the FFO variable proxies for university size from 1994). As before, data for five universities is missing and six universities were created during the period of observation, thus generating in this case an unbalanced panel with a total number of 388 cases. We used the following logistic regression model to estimate covariate effects on the likelihood that a specific university in a given year adopts a patent regulation: REGi,t = exp(γ Ui,t + δ Ki,t−1 + β NREGt−1 + εi,t ) where the variables REGi,t , Ui,t and Ki,t−1 are the same as described in the previous model, and NREGt−1 is the cumulative count of university-level patent regulations adopted in Italy up to year t − 1. Baldini et al. (2004) analyzed the textual content of university-level patent regulations and found that their diffusion among the Italian academic system followed a mimetic process. Therefore we expect that, as the adoption of universitylevel patent regulations spreads, the likelihood that nonregulated universities adopt them will increase. 5. Results 5.1. Patenting trends In Fig. 2 we report the yearly data from 1965 to 2002 on the number of patents filed by Italian universities

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Fig. 2. Number of applications and of extensions per year. Source: our elaborations on database PATUNIT and UIBM, 2003.

only at the UIBM, the number of patents initially filed at UIBM and then extended abroad, and the number of patents filed abroad directly. Moreover, we report the total number of patent applications filed by any applicant and received by the UIBM since 1990, to compare academic trends with the ones generally observed at the country-level. Data show that in 1996, when Law 168/1989 came in full force, the number of patents roughly doubled with respect to the previous year. From 1997 onwards there has been a positive trend, with a peak of 121 patents in 2001. Conversely, the total number of patents filed at UIBM during the 1990s steadily declined in the first half, picked up again in 1997 and remained fairly stable thereafter. Another interesting pattern emerging from the data is related to the geographic extension of patent protection. While Italy continues over the years to play a significant role, the sum of the applications extended and those filed abroad directly rose from 15 in 1996 to 76 in 2002. Moreover, starting from 1998, this group of patent applications always accounted for more than 50% of total applications. In 2002, the last year of our observations, we notice a reduction in the total number of patents filed. Considering that we are examining the far right part of our temporal distribution, this could be due to right-censoring problems associated with patent filing procedure. Or, we might be observing the first effects of Law 383/2001, granting IPRs to inventors rather than to universities. Out of 63 universities in our sample of potential applicants, 50 filed at least one patent, with an average of 13.2 applications per university (standard deviation = 16.2). The top 3 applicants account for 28.7% of all applications, the top 5 for 41.2% and the top 10 for 60.2%. The

total number of universities that applied for at least one patent grew fairly regularly from 19 in 1989 to 50 in 2002. A closer look at the applicants’ names shows that, during the whole period, in 28.4% of cases there are two or more applicants. Only 3.3% of patents are applied for by two or more Italian universities, 7.8% by CNR (National Research Centre, the largest Italian PRO), 10.5% by firms, 4.2% by individual inventors, 11.8% by other PROs (including both foreign universities and PROs, and Italian PROs). On the inventors’ side, in 14.7% of cases there is a single inventor. As for the remaining cases, the number of inventors is two in 21.3% of cases, three in 25.1%, four in 18.9% and five in 11.4%. The percentage of patents for which there are more than five inventors (up to 10) is 8.6%. In the whole period, 79.6% of the inventors appear in only one patent, 13.2% of inventors appear in two and 7.2% of inventors in three patents or more. Finally, looking at the distribution of patents across technology classes as defined by IPC, the highest concentration of patents (38.5%) is in Sector C (metallurgy and chemistry), while Sector A (human necessities, mainly agriculture and health-related technologies) accounts for 25.4% of patents. Sector G (physics) accounts for 17.5% of all patents, Sector B (performing operations and transporting) for 8.1%, Sector H (electricity) for 6.1%, and Sector F (mechanical engineering, lighting, heating, weapons and blasting) for 3.1%. 5.2. The role of internal IPR regulations The full implementation of the universities’ recently granted autonomy is followed by important changes in the patenting activities at Italian universities. The

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cient set equal to −1 for the first period, 0 for the second period and +1 for the third period. Using 1990 as the starting year of the non-regulated periods and 2002 as the finishing year of the regulated periods, we have an average of 0.76 patents per year before the approval of the patent regulation, 1.52 in the year of approval and 3.24 per year in the following period (p < 0.001). The results remain significant at the 0.1% level after allowing for different periods of observation before and after the patent regulation. Fig. 3. Number of applications as a function of patent policy. Source: our elaborations on database PATUNIT and REGUNIT.

5.3. Multivariate analysis of patenting activity

average number of patents filed per year increases by about 14 times after 1996 (unequal variance t-test, t = 4.68; p < 0.01). Due to the fact that patenting activities of Italian universities are concentrated in the right part of our period of observation, we repeated the same analysis, splitting the patent pool into three groups: patents filed between 1980 and 1995 (group A), those filed between 1990 and 1995 (group B), and those filed from 1996 onwards (group C). Differences between groups A or B and group C are still substantial and remain statistically significant (unequal variance t-tests: A versus C: t = 4.52, p < 0.01; B versus C: t = 4.23, p < 0.01). In Fig. 3 we show the number of patent applications filed in the last 9 years, distinguishing regulated patents from non-regulated ones. The percentage of regulated patents on the total number of patents has grown since 1997 and reached 79.5% in 2002. The increasing trend in the total number of patents is due to the regulated patents, while the trend in non-regulated patents appears more varied. In particular, the decrease in the number of patent applications registered in 2002 almost disappears if we take into account only regulated patents. These results suggest that researchers themselves grant IPRs to universities more often than would be expected under the new IP regime granting IPRs to inventors, and this happens more often in universities that already had patent regulations in force before the approval of the new IPR regime. In the sub-sample of the 12 universities that adopted a patent regulation before 1st January 2000, the average number of patents per year (calculated on a 3-year window before and 3 years after the date of adoption) rose from 0.8 before the patent regulation, to 3.6 after (paired sample t-test, t = 3.62; p < 0.01). We also used ANOVA to compare between-group differences in the average number of patents per year in the year of adoption, the years before and the years after. To test for increasing numbers of patents in the three periods observed, we therefore decided to calculate a linear contrast test, with coeffi-

We provide the summary statistics for the variables of the negative binomial model exploring Italian universities’ patenting activities as a function of different university characteristics in Table 2, while Table 3 reports the results. Results are reported as incidence rate ratios, which can be interpreted as the percentage change in the dependent variable for a one-unit change in the independent variable, and allow for comparisons across coefficients. A ratio smaller than 1 indicates a negative relationship between the dependent and the independent variable, and a ratio greater than 1 indicates a positive relationship. Overall model fit is assessed by Wald χ2 . All models include the MED and SOUTH dummies, measuring whether university i has a medical school or not and whether it is located in the South of Italy or not; the REG variable, measuring whether university i has adopted (or not) a patent regulation in year t − 1, or before; PATi,t−1 , the 1-year lagged dependent variable; and a time variable (TIME) to catch any exogenous trend due to the external environment. To control for universities’ size, in models 1, 3 and 5 we use the natural logarithm of the FFO at year t in order to maximize the use of available data, while in models 2, 4, and 6 we use a 1-year lag for the FFO variable. In models 3, 4, 5 and 6 we include BBLCUMi,t−1 , the cumulative number of inventions patented at the EPO (until period t − 1) by researchers belonging to the university i but not applied for by any Italian universities. Finally, in models 5 and 6 we also include CUMi,t−2 , the cumulative number of inventions patented at university i, until year t − 2, to control for the role of previous university-owned patenting activities. Consistent with the evidence emerging from the univariate analyses, the importance of the adoption of an internal IPR regulation is significant at the 0.1% level in all estimates and it is robust to several different specifications. Controlling for all other factors, in any given year the number of patents in universities with an internal IPR regulation is between 2.6

N. Baldini et al. / Research Policy 35 (2006) 518–532

527

Table 2 Summary statistics for the negative binomial model BBLCUMi,t−1

CUMi,t−2

FFOi,t

FFOi,t−1

Mean Standard deviation Minimum Maximum

18.610 28.010 0 149

3.284 6.696 0 62

4.074 0.981 1.313 6.276

4.114 0.966 1.406 6.276

BBLCUMi,t−1 CUMi,t−2 FFOi,t FFOi,t−1 MEDi PATi,t−1 REGi,t−1 SOUTHi TIMEt

1 0.738 0.636 0.635 0.317 0.594 0.397 −0.230 0.066

1 0.484 0.496 0.270 0.703 0.453 −0.181 0.253

1 0.996 0.529 0.401 0.218 0.076 0.157

1 0.529 0.427 0.227 0.076 0.157

MEDi

PATi,t−1

REGi,t−1

0.619 0.486 0 1

0.872 1.859 0 17

1 0.203 0.151 −0.111 −0.003

1 0.520 −0.135 0.283

SOUTHi

TIMEt

0.213 0.410 0 1

0.300 0.459 0 1

1998.12 2.587 1994 2002

1 −0.113 0.339

1 0.016

1

N = 493. Sources: database PATUNIT, database EPO-INVDOC (Balconi et al., 2003b), Ministry of Education, University and Research.

and 2.9 times higher than in universities without such regulations. As expected, the cumulative number of inventions previously patented by researchers working at the uni-

versity, but not applied for by the university, positively affects the number of university patent applications in any given year. This result is always statistically significant at least at the 5% level and it is robust to several

Table 3 Negative binomial estimation of patenting activity Model 1a

Model 2a

Model 3a

Model 4a

Model 5a

Model 6a

PATi,t−1

1.037 (0.024)

1.035 (0.028)

1.009 (0.024)

0.998 (0.028)

1.094** (0.036)

1.030 (0.039)

FFOi,t

1.962*** (0.401) 1.982** (0.432)

FFOi,t−1

REGi,t−1 TIMEt SOUTHi MEDi

1.538† (0.345)

2.949*** (0.494) 1.104*** (0.034) 0.527* (0.149) 1.350 (0.441)

1.467† (0.322) 1.503 (0.386)

2.799*** (0.492) 1.120** (0.049) 0.521* (0.141) 1.307 (0.449)

2.839*** (0.516) 1.122*** (0.039) 0.620 (0.193) 1.524 (0.443)

2.646*** (0.555) 1.148** (0.059) 0.607 (0.193) 1.505 (0.477)

320.29 435 58

1.008* (0.003) 280.41 493 58

1.010** (0.004) 270.57 435 58

CUMi,t−2 BBLCUMi,t−1 Wald χ2 No. of observations No. of universities

347.11 493 58

1.478 (0.394) 2.801*** (0.490) 1.124*** (0.038) 0.692 (0.214) 1.587 (0.465) 0.964** (0.017) 1.012** (0.004) 441.48 493 58

Sources: database PATUNIT, database EPO-INVDOC (Balconi et al., 2003b), Ministry of Education, University and Research. a Incidence rates ratios are reported. Robust standard errors in parenthesis. * p < 0.05. ** p < 0.01. *** p < 0.001. † p < 0.10.

2.604*** (0.546) 1.165** (0.057) 0.618 (0.206) 1.525 (0.502) 0.975 (0.020) 1.013** (0.005) 293.41 435 58

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N. Baldini et al. / Research Policy 35 (2006) 518–532

different specifications, although its magnitude is limited (it takes about 100 non-university patents registered cumulatively in the previous years to have one more university patent application in any given year). The number of past patents applied for by universities is never a statistically significant predictor of the number of patent applications in any given year, apart from model 5. Results on the effect of the cumulative number of patents previously applied for by the university are mixed. The estimate reported in model 5 is significant at the 1% level, while the estimate reported in model 6 is not statistically different from zero. In both cases, however, the estimates are smaller than 1, thus consistently pointing to a negative effect of previous patenting activities, controlling for all other factors. Even in this case, however, the effect is small, as it takes 100 previous patent applications to reduce the number of patent applications in any given year by three units. If jointly considered with the positive value taken by the PATi,t−1 coefficient, the net effect can as well be neutral. The evidence of the role of university-level characteristics is sensitive to the different specifications. The SOUTH variable is always smaller than one, pointing to higher levels of patenting activities for universities located in the North and the Centre of Italy, but its statistical significance disappears, when considering the cumulative number of inventions previously patented by researchers working at a university, but not applied for by any Italian university. The presence of a medical school is never statistically significant. In fact, only 13.3% of inventors working in academia and registered in the PATUNIT database perform research in the medical area, against 28.3% in the engineering and ICT area, 21.9% in the biological area and 23.3% in chemistry. This is due to the fact that, in the Italian university system, major patenting disciplines such as pharmaceuticals, genetics,

molecular biology, organic and inorganic chemistry, and parts of biochemistry, lie outside the medical schools. As for the size of the university, the non-lagged variable is always greater than one and it is marginally statistically significant (p < 0.10), whereas the lagged variable is still consistently greater than 1, but is statistically significant only in model 2. While differences in the efficiency of the estimate provided by these variables emerge, the magnitude of the coefficients in the more complete models does signal a size effect, consistent with other findings on university patenting activities. Finally, the time variable accounts for an increasing trend in the patenting activity of about 11% a year (p < 0.001), as shown in Fig. 1. More importantly, its inclusion in the model strengthens the other estimates, as this increasing trend is controlled for. 5.4. Factors affecting the adoption of an internal IPR regulation Summary statistics for factors affecting the likelihood of adoption of a university-level patent regulation are reported in Table 4, while Table 5 presents estimates for the logistic models. Odds ratios are reported: the odds ratio gives the percentage change in the probability of the outcome (the dependent variable = 1), given a one unit change in the independent variable. An odds ratio of less than 1 occurs when the coefficient is negative, while an odds ratio greater than 1 occurs when the coefficient is positive. Model 1 predicts the likelihood of adoption of a patent regulation on the basis of the size of the university, the presence of a medical school and the geographical location. Larger universities are more likely to adopt a patent regulation (p < 0.10), but overall the model is not significant (χ2 = 4.43). Model 2 adds the covariates describing patenting activities and is significant (χ2 = 12.00;

Table 4 Summary statistics for the logistic model BBLCUMi,t−1

FFOi,t−1

Mean Standard deviation Minimum Maximum

17.248 22.840 0 128

3.958 0.937 1.313 6.222

0.568 0.496 0 1

10.671 7.926 2 27

0.306 0.461 0 1

BBLCUMi,t−1 FFOi,t−1 MEDi NREGi,t−1 SOUTHi CUMi,t−1

1 0.624 0.325 0.013 −0.196 0.628

1 0.578 0.101 0.164 0.446

1 −0.061 −0.113 0.267

1 0.059 0.160

1 −0.086

MEDi

NREGi,t−1

SOUTHi

N = 388. Sources: database PATUNIT, database EPO-INVDOC (Balconi et al., 2003b), Ministry of Education, University and Research.

CUMi,t−1 3.117 5.342 0 29

1

N. Baldini et al. / Research Policy 35 (2006) 518–532 Table 5 Logistic regression of patent regulations

FFOi,t SOUTHi MEDi

Model 1a

Model 2a

Model 3a

1.620† (0.466) 0.749 (0.329) 0.932 (0.509)

0.871 (0.311) 1.385 (0.725) 1.261 (0.690) 1.028 (0.035)

0.614 (0.235) 1.709 (0.926) 1.678 (0.966) 0.995 (0.038)

1.021 (0.011)

1.040*** (0.013) 1.091*** (0.027) 21.74** −90.98 13.6*** 388 56

CUMi,t−1 BBLCUMi,t−1

NREGi,t−1 Wald ␹2 Log likelihood −2 Log likelihood Number of observations Number of universities

4.43 −100.79 388 56

12.00* −97.78 6.02* 388 56

Sources: database PATUNIT, database EPO-INVDOC (Balconi et al., 2003b), Ministry of Education, University and Research. a Odds ratios are reported. Robust standard errors in parenthesis. * p < 0.05. ** p < 0.01. *** p < 0.001. † p < 0.10.

p < 0.05). Only patents filed but not owned by universities affect the likelihood of adoption of a patent regulation: each patent increases such likelihood by 2.1% (p = 0.058). Size is negatively related to regulatory activities, although it is not significant. The inclusion of the cumulative number of patent regulations adopted by Italian universities up to t − 1, in model 3, increases the overall efficiency of the estimates (χ2 = 13.6; p < 0.001). In the full model, any additional regulation adopted by Italian universities increases the likelihood of adoption by 9% (p < 0.001). Location in the South of the country, the presence of a medical school and the size of universities as proxied by the budget transfer from the central government (FFO) are insignificant. With regard to previous patenting activities, any additional patent filed by the university decreases the likelihood of adoption by 0.5% (the coefficient is not significant), while any additional patent filed by university professors and not owned by any Italian universities increases the likelihood of adoption of 4% (p < 0.01). 6. Discussion and conclusion In this paper we have analyzed Italian universities’ patenting activities in the last 40 years and their evo-

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lution following a set of well identifiable major institutional changes, affecting the level of autonomy granted to universities, and organizational changes concerning the adoption of their decision to establish internal IPR regulations. The multivariate analysis shows that patent applications were characterized by a significant increase of around 10% a year after the publication of D.M. 9th February 1996, which gave universities, among other things, full autonomy in the management of technology transfer activities. Moreover, the adoption of a university-level patent regulation almost triples the rate of patenting activities, after controlling for a university’s size, geographical location, the presence of a medical school, and the number of patent applications filed before the adoption of the regulation. The positive effect of the control variables for size and geographical location, although not always statistically significant, are in line with the results of previous studies highlighting scale effects in academic patenting and the complementary role of the surrounding industrial environment. The complementary role of university–industry collaborations is also reflected by the positive influence of the number of inventions previously patented by researchers working at the university but applied for by other organizations. A closer look at some factors potentially influencing the adoption of IPR regulations shows that universityassigned patents are not important, while non-university patents resulting from collaborative programmes with industrial partners or other PROs are important, controlling for university’s size, geographical location, and the presence of a medical school, none of which yields significant results. It is unclear if universities, aware of extra moenia patenting activities of their faculty, adopted a more entrepreneurial strategy, as signalled by the adoption of a patent regulation in a period of shrinking budgets, or if the faculty itself, copying the experience of some pioneers, forced the adoption of the regulation, as well as other facilities within their universities to support their patenting activities. Finally, the adoption of IPR regulations has spread rapidly within the Italian academic system, following a mimetic isomorphism pattern, which contributes to the formation of a professional community with a new set of norms and values (Baldini et al., 2004). We are unable to assess fully the impact of the important reform introduced by Law 383/2001, which completely switched the ownership regime in favour of individual inventors, for which the first normative effects of the IPR regulations have just started to become clear. Although our data seems to confirm an inherent characteristic of large organizations being to react quickly to institutional changes offering new opportunities, and

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much more slowly, if at all, to those generating new limits, at present there are not enough observations to test this interpretation. More recent analyses of the impact of the Bayh-Dole Act have questioned its fundamental role in significantly changing IPR management practices within U.S. universities (Mowery et al., 2004). Yet, even the most dubious scholars admit that the Bayh-Dole Act reinforced a shift in the way academic institutions interpreted their role and structured themselves to manage IPRs. Our study confirms such patterns, albeit in a significantly different economic environment and of a different time. Our study links the emergence of a new role for universities to major institutional changes, not directly affecting IPR management or technology transfer processes, but rather providing a more general set of opportunities to structure the activities performed within universities. Moreover, the diffusion of administrative practices leveraging these new opportunities took time to come into effect. This diffusion process relied heavily on the initiatives taken by some influential pioneers (Baldini et al., 2004) and took about a decade to become fully legitimized. In Europe the attention to technology transfer by universities is still a recent phenomenon and only in the last few years have some systematic studies started to appear (e.g. Goldfarb and Henrekson, 2003; Henrekson and Rosenberg, 2001; Meyer, 2003; van Looy et al., 2004). While most universities have been investing their resources to create internal conditions to support the commercialization of their research results, there are still some major concerns that need to be addressed. One issue that seems to arise in the debate is how to adopt a Bayh-Dole-like legislation in other countries. In order to achieve this goal, it is important first to analyze how legislative and organizational changes interact with specificities of the local context, and we believe that our research is a first step in this direction. Griliches (1984) highlighted some limitations, related to using patents, that are relevant in our case. First, as patenting activity is, to a considerable extent, a fieldspecific phenomenon, when comparing it amongst different institutions, one should take into account the underlying differences that are related to specialization within scientific and technological domains characterized by different levels of patenting opportunities. While we have tried to account for such possible bias by controlling for the specific role of health-related disciplines, this issue remains particularly critical whenever considering direct inter-university or inter-country comparisons. Second, with regard to IPR regulations, differences at the institutional and organizational level will undoubtedly affect the extent to which different actors are willing

to engage in patenting activities. Moreover, patents are an important precondition to increase subsequent licensing opportunities, and TTOs become critical at this stage to conceive applications, to identify potential licensees, and to develop sales packages for potential customers (Thursby et al., 2001). While some analyses of U.S. universities’ licensing patterns are starting to appear, we are not aware of significant effort in this direction made by European universities. More research is certainly needed in this direction. Third, patents are usually aggregated at the organizational level, but patenting remains an individual activity. To fully understand and evaluate the trends in patenting activity it is therefore important to consider the information set possessed by the actors who are likely to be involved, as well as their professional and personal motivations and incentives. When considering jointly the individual scientist and the university, the possible detrimental effects of patents on scientific productivity and the free circulation of basic knowledge within the community of researchers are two major concerns. Some recent studies exploring the supposed rivalry between patenting activities and researchers’ scientific productivity, however, find no support for such fears (Breschi et al., 2004; Calderini and Franzoni, 2004; Lach and Schankerman, 2003). The success in publication and the success in patenting appear to be strongly correlated and to generate a complementary reinforcing effect on individual careers. No direct evidence exists at present on these effects at the institutional level, aside from the possible aggregation at the university level of individual researchers’ profiles. Both aspects deserve further investigation, specifically with respect to possible differences in the collaboration propensity of patenters versus non-patenters, the impact that successful patenting has on the researchers’ openness to the community, and the circulation of knowledge and ideas. A recent work by Balconi et al. (2004) shows how – in fields where academic inventors lead the discovery process—the research and industrial community is more densely connected and more interactions exist than in fields dominated by industrial inventors. It would be interesting to assess the effect, if any, of changes in the universities’ IPR policies on such characteristics. All these limitations notwithstanding, we believe that our research presents an additional unique contribution by providing a specific and detailed description of the Italian universities’ patenting activities. The results are particularly interesting if we take into account the rather bureaucratic and static image usually associated with Italian universities and the Italian public research system

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as a whole. Moreover, considering that the amount of resources available has not increased significantly since 1996, we document a marked increase in the number of patent applications per unit of research investment. The role and function of individual countries’ policies, especially on science and technology, is an issue of particular current interest to E.U. members. We believe that more careful and detailed analyses at the country level could offer important insights for an informed decision making process. Acknowledgements We are grateful to Sebastiano Fabio Plutino (PATLIB Center of Bologna) who provided us with technical assistance for the queries on the National Patent Database. We thank Mario Calderini, Giuseppe Catalano, Chiara Franzoni and the three anonymous referees for their useful comments; we also thank, Paul Ellis (London Business School) for editorial assistance. We are indebted to Francesco Lissoni for giving us access to the EPO-INVDOC database (Balconi et al., 2003a). The responsibility for any mistakes or omissions remains ours. Financial support from FIRB project # RBNE03ZLFW is gratefully acknowledged. References Agrawal, A., Henderson, R., 2002. Putting patents in context: exploring knowledge transfer from MIT. Management Science 48, 44–60. AUTM, 2003. Licensing survey: FY 2002. www.autm.net. Balconi, M., Borghini, S., Moisello, A., 2003a. Ivory tower vs. spanning university: il caso dell’Universit`a di Pavia. In: Bonaccorsi, A. (Ed.), Il Sistema della Ricerca Pubblica in Italia. Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 133–175. Balconi, M., Breschi, S., Lissoni, F., 2003b. Il trasferimento di conoscenze tecnologiche dall’universit`a all’industria in Italia: nuova evidenza sui brevetti di paternit`a dei docenti. In: Bonaccorsi, A. (Ed.), Il Sistema Della Ricerca Pubblica in Italia. Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 58–100. Balconi, M., Breschi, S., Lissoni, F., 2004. Networks of inventors and the role of academia: an exploration of Italian patent data. Research Policy 33, 127–145. Baldini, N., Grimaldi, R., Sobrero, M., 2004. La diffusione di pratiche organizzative tra pressioni ambientali e processi di legittimazione: un’analisi empirica dei regolamenti universitari in materia di invenzioni. In: Zollo, G. (Ed.), Valori, Risorse e Competenze nelle Organizzazioni. Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Naples. Breschi, S., Lissoni, F., Montobbio, F., 2004. Open science and university patenting: A bibliometric analysis of the Italian case. In: International J. A. Schumpeter Society Conference, Milan, 9–12 June. Calderini, M., Franzoni, C., 2004. Is academic patenting detrimental to high quality research? An empirical analysis of the relationship between scientific careers and patent applications. Working paper # 162, CESPRI, Bocconi University, Milan.

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