Does Policy Matter?

This paper presents work in progress to a broader research programme on German and European universities ’ technology transfer activities. We investigate the effects of the German Employee Invention Act (2002) by comparing the patenting behaviour of universities over three distinct time periods before and after the law is introduced to find out whether it constitutes a discernible change in university patenting. In a second model we take a closer look on the institutional determinants of university-to-industry technology transfer under the new law. In the two periods prior the new law the age of the first patent significantly influences the total number of patents significantly; this effect vanishes in the third period, where only the number of patents filed in earlier time periods does have a significant effect. These results suggest that the new law was able to disturb existing path dependencies but still patent experience plays a key role in university-to-industry technology transfer