University patents: output and input indicators … of what?

The increasing public and institutional support for university patents has opened two major sources of debate: First, does this emphasis affect the quality of research? Second, are university patents an effective mechanism for university-industry interaction? Our aim is to address both questions by clarifying the nature of university patents as outputs of different types of research and inputs of diverse instruments of interaction. We focus on the case of the Polytechnic University of Valencia at departmental level. We first construct a patent production function to discriminate what kind of research gives rise to patents and, second, several funding functions to find for which instruments patents are a better input. University patents appear to be an output of costly and long-term oriented research, either publicly or privately financed –in this latter case, through an indirect effect, the provision of industrial knowledge–, and also the input of a certain type of interaction –not through licensing but through signalling competencies. The fear that university patents affect negatively the quality of research is not justified, as they are the outcome of research at the frontiers of science. However, it is true that university patents only stimulate interaction with those firms that have enough absorptive capacity. If interaction with less capable firms is intended, other instruments are required.