Benchmarking U.S. university patent value and commercialization efforts: A new approach

•Estimates the value of university patent portfolios.•Estimates the fraction of private economic value captured by universities through licensing.•Applies the methodology developed by Kogan et al. (2017) to estimate the value of a portfolio of corporate patents matched to similar university patents.•Investigates factors correlated with university patent value, including the presence of a medical school or a business school, R&D expenditure, the number of faculty members, and whether the university is a Carnegie-ranked research university.•Finds that universities capture on average 16% of the economic value of their patents through licensing revenues. Despite the economic significance of patented university research, it is difficult to measure the economic value of academic patented inventions and observe the extent to which universities are able to capture such value through patent licensing. Moving beyond assessing commercialization performance by simple statistics, we propose a new approach to benchmarking university patents and commercialization performance based on comparative corporate patent value. Our procedure involves matching university patents to patents with similar patent characteristics granted to public corporations, then estimating the “potential value” of these university patents by stock market reactions to grants of the matched corporate patents. These estimated values of university patents can significantly explain the technology-level income from licensing by a leading US research university and the annual licensing income of the member universities of the Association of University Technology Managers’ (AUTM). We find that AUTM universities realize an average of 16% of the estimated value of matched corporate patents. We also investigate correlates of university‐level potential patent value and suggest avenues for future research.