The determinants of European universities patenting and co-patenting with companies

Abstract This study examines the determinants of European universities patenting and co-patenting with companies. The analysis takes into account more than 400 universities from 17 countries over the period 2011–2018. We test several determinants of the commercial activity of universities, such as: student enrolment (size), age, public or private nature of the institution, students per academic staff, publications per academic staff (research orientation), non-academic staff per academic staff, funding structure (core and third-party budget) and prior patent activity. We estimate two-part models with zero-inflated negative binomial/zero-inflated beta regressions, which estimate separately the impact of the determinant of patenting (count data/proportion of joint company-university patents) and the probability of no patenting. The results indicate that the main determinants of universities patenting and co-patenting with companies are: size, age, research orientation and funding structure. As for patents per se, the determinants of starting patenting are the same as continuing patenting, while for joint company-university patents, most of the determinants differently affect starting joint-patenting than increasing the proportion of co-patents with companies in all patents.