Playing the ‘Name Game’ to identify academic patents in Germany

Identifying academic inventors is crucial for reliable assessments of academic patenting and for understanding patent-based university-to-industry technology transfer. It requires solving the “who is who” problem at the individual inventor level. This article describes data collection and matching techniques applied to identify academic inventors in Germany. To manage the large dataset, we adjust a matching technique applied in prior research by comparing the inventor and professor names in the first step after cleaning. We also suggest a new approach for determining the similarity score. To evaluate our methodology we apply it to the EP-INV-PatStat database and compare its results to alternative approaches. For our German data, results are less sensitive to the choice of name comparison algorithm than to the specific filtering criteria employed. Restricting the search to EPO applications or identifying inventors by professor title underestimates academic patenting in Germany.