Abstract
Discussions of academic entrepreneurship often focus on efforts to commercialize inventions appropriated within the intellectual property (IP) system. However, studies in the U.S. have shown that a substantial amount of entrepreneurship happens outside of the formal IP system.
In the UK each university sets its own rules on ownership of IP. In a few European countries, like Sweden, an inventor ownership model is dominating. There is a lack of studies of European academic entrepreneurship outside of the formal IP system; and accordingly there have been few possibilities to analyze the effects of different institutional set ups.
To help fill this gap, this chapter analyses how different institutional settings affect academic entrepreneurship in Europe. By analyzing both patents and spin-offs (from Oxford University, UK and Chalmers University, Sweden) we will shed light on two processes for commercialization of university research. We empirically investigate university technology transfer at two different universities in two countries with a different inventor ownership regulation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Funding of British HEIs (Higher Education Institutes) partly depends on spin-off creation, and, thus, the data reporting is not likely to be an underestimation. See http://www.hefce.ac.uk/econsoc/buscom/hebci/. This data is collected annually from British HEIs since 2003.
- 3.
The AUTM data only report spin-offs based on disclosures registered at participating universities. It should be noted that the AUTM studies only include data from less than 200 US Universities. These universities are, however, the most research intensive ones. AUTM data for 2004–2010 is available at http://www.autm.net/home.htm
- 4.
The KEINS database on academic inventors contains detailed information on university professors from France, Italy, and Sweden, who appear as designated inventors on one or more patent application registered at the European Patent Office (EPO), 1978–2004. It was produced for the EU-sponsored project on Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Networks and Systems, and is made available to all interested researchers through the CESPRI website. http://www.cespri.unibocconi.it
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Hallur Sigurdarsson, CBS, Denmark and Sten Dieden, CIRCLE, Lund University, for assistance with the Chalmers data.
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Lindholm Dahlstrand, Å.T., Lawton Smith, H., Baines, N. (2016). Academic Entrepreneurship: Spin-offs in Sweden and the UK. In: Audretsch, D., Lehmann, E., Meoli, M., Vismara, S. (eds) University Evolution, Entrepreneurial Activity and Regional Competitiveness. International Studies in Entrepreneurship, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17713-7_6
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