The determinants of national patent ownership by Public Research

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