Scientific productivity and patenting at the laboratory level: an analysis of Brazilian public research laboratories

In this study, we investigated how different styles of research organisation of laboratories were related to scientific performance and patenting. From a Brazilian national database that included 1,412 laboratories, we defined a typology with five categories of laboratories. The categories were defined based on team composition—represented by the participation of permanent researchers, postgraduate students, and technicians—and by the scope of activities conducted in the laboratories. Adopting the concept of knowledge production functions, we estimated the productivity of the different categories of laboratories and the elasticities of capital and labour available for scientific production and patenting at the laboratory level. We found that medium-scale university laboratories focused on teaching and research reported higher scientific productivity, whereas laboratories focused on providing technological services and small-scale laboratories, which were less common in universities, filed for more patents. The estimation of knowledge production functions showed that scientific production was determined both by capital and by the labour of permanent and non-permanent researchers. Patenting was mainly determined by the labour factor. We also found complementarity between scientific production and patenting as well as constant returns to scale for scientific production at the laboratory level.