Academic Patenting and the Consequences for Scientific Research

In this article we provide a summary and discussion of the effects of intellectual property (IP) rights on new technological and scientific solutions generated by academic scholars. We do so by commenting on the main empirical findings that have emerged from the recent literature. It is well known how public funding of research and development (R&D) activities is justified by the need to overcome market failures and to sustain the generation of knowledge spillovers with positive externalities in the economic system. Since the early 1980s, a series of policy interventions firstly in the United States and later in Europe assigned the IP rights of publicly funded research to universities and other public research organisations (PROs)1 to stimulate their commercialisation. The rationale of this intervention is that privatising university research output enables superior exploitation because it overcomes the problem of expropriation typical of public goods. Adapted from the source document.