How does public research affect industry innovation and entrepreneurship? New evidence

This chapter explores the direct contribution of public research to technical inventions, based on a newly compiled database covering 36 countries over the period 1992-2013 that matches data on public research institutions and patent applications to the European Patent Office. Based on this data, it looks at technology trends in university patenting trends in university-industry research collaboration (based on joint patenting activity) differences in the characteristics of public research patents and private patents and the impact of public research institutions on local innovation (i.e. the importance of geographic proximity). The last section explores the characteristics of academic start-ups based on data from Crunchbase for OECD and BRICS countries for the period 2001-16. It presents trends observed with three types of academic start-ups: companies with a student founder, a PhD founder, and a founder with research experience.