The spread of academic invention: a nationwide case study on French data (1995–2012)

Although numerous public policies have been introduced to incentivize scholars and researchers employed in universities and public laboratories to generate and transfer inventions, the extent and drivers of any spread in patenting behavior within the academic community have not yet been fully documented. We propose a nationwide empirical investigation of patented academic inventions in France over nearly two decades which offers a number of results that are either new, or confirm previous insights on a much larger dataset. We find that the direct contribution of academia to the nation's flow of patented inventions is revised upwards, up to eleven percent of all patented inventions. We also show that patenting behavior is more pervasive in the academic community than expected with one in five professors or researchers having invented at least one patent in nearly all fields of hard and life sciences. Even if academic patenting was strong before the 1999 reform favoring technology transfer, the propensity of professors and researchers to invent has significantly increased over the subsequent period. Though age plays positively on patenting, more recent cohorts of faculty members are not more likely to patent so that individual factors cannot fully explain the increasing propensity to patent. Lastly, we examine social and cultural factors (e.g. peer effects and local diffusion of behavioral practices), in particular within labs, which are found to be important drivers of the spread of patenting in the academic community.