We examine ownership patterns of German university-invented patents before and after the abolition of the "professors' privilege" in 2002 to explore how the legal change affected patenting activities. Our data show a shift from individually-owned and firm-owned patents to university-owned...

Collaboration over distance is difficult to maintain in innovation projects which require a great deal of regional collaboration. However, patent documents reveal that a number of inventor teams are able to overcome long distances. Earlier literature started to investigate factors, which...

The paper compares academic and corporate patents in Germany to shed light on the geographical distribution of the inventors. The residences of the inventors show different patterns in the two datasets. Furthermore, we analyze the spatial distance between inventors for patents invented in...

Academic inventions have to be transferred to industry to become an innovation. Scientists face multiple options for this transfer, from informal knowledge transfers to patents, licences, and spin-offs. These transfer channels require different efforts and inhibit different degrees of...