University patenting and scientific productivity: a quantitative study of Italian academic inventors Stefano Breschi 1 , Francesco Lissoni 1,2 , Fabio Montobbio 1,3 1 CESPRI, Department of Economics, Universita ` L. Bocconi, Milan, Italy; 2 Department of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering, Universita ` degli studi di Brescia, Italy; 3 Department of Economics, Universita ` degli studi dell’Insubria, Varese, Italy Correspondence: Stefano Breschi, CESPRI, Department of Economics, Universita ` L. Bocconi, Via Sarfatti 25, Milan 20136, Italy. Tel: þ 39 02 58363365; E-mail: stefano.breschi@unibocconi.it Abstract Based on longitudinal data for a matched sample of 592 Italian academic inventors and controls, the paper explores the impact of patenting on university professors’ scientific productivity, as measured by publication and citation counts. Academic inventors, that is, university professors who appear as designated inventors on at least one patent application, publish more and better quality papers than their non-patenting colleagues, and increase their productivity after patenting. Endogeneity problems are addressed by using instrumental variables and applying inverse probability of treatment weights. The beneficial effect of patenting on publication rates last longer for serial academic inventors. However, the positive effect of patenting on scientific productivity largely differs across scientific fields, being particularly strong only in pharmaceuticals and electronics. European Management Review (2008) 5, 91–109. doi:10.1057/emr.2008.9 Keywords: scientific productivity; university patents; technology transfer Introduction T he increasing involvement of US universities in patenting and commercialization of research results is a well-documented phenomenon (Mowery et al., 2004), but recent studies have uncovered unexpected rates of university patenting also in Europe. In particular, new measurement efforts have highlighted that, although university-owned patents are still a relatively rare phenom- enon in Europe, there exists a sizable and growing number of university-invented patents, that is inventions by one or more academic scientists whose intellectual property rights are assigned to business companies, governmental funding agencies or individual scientists. The most convincing evidence has been produced for Italy, France, Sweden, Finland and Germany (Meyer et al., 2003; Schmiemann and Durvy, 2003; Balconi et al., 2004; Lissoni et al., 2008), while case studies and survey research have suggested that a similar pattern could be found also in Spain, Belgium and the UK (Azagra Caro et al., 2003; Saragossi and van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, 2003; Crespi et al., 2006). Taken together, university-owned and university-invented patents are now commonly referred to as ‘academic patents’. These findings have raised several concerns both in society and among scholars and practitioners about the potentially detrimental consequences of academic patenting on the pace of scientific and technological progress that might derive from (1) restrictions of access to the outcomes of (publicly funded) research and (2) changes in the academic scientists’ incentives to carry out fundamental research. In this paper, we address in particular the second type of concerns by investigating the following questions. Does involvement in patenting affect academic scientists’ research effort and productivity? Does it affect the direction of research, by diverting scientists’ attention away from basic research and towards more applied fields of enquiry? Is there any detectable difference in the impact of patenting across technologies and disciplines? Does the nature of patent owners (academic vs business vs individual) bear an influence on how patenting affects research? We attempt to provide an answer to such questions by building on our own previous research on Italian academic inventors (Balconi et al., 2004). Specifically, we examine the scientific productivity for a large sample of Italian academic inventors, that is, university professors who appear as European Management Review (2008) 5, 91–109 & 2008 EURAM Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 1740-4754/08 palgrave-journals.com/emr