This paper analyses the development of universities' patent applications in Germany before and after the abolition of the 'professors' privilege' in 2002. By means of a database with all patent applications of German universities with professors among the inventors (1990-2006), systematic...

The paper studies the patent productivity of scientists over their life cycle. The incentives for patenting and for publishing are compared and how they shape life cycle productivity. In most empirical studies, publication productivity decreases at the end of the scientific career. In contrast,...

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...

Today it is generally accepted that innovation, knowledge creation, and the diffusion of new knowledge are crucial factors for economic growth at the regional, national, as well as supra-national level, and that successful innovation is increasingly based on interactions and collaborative...

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 at hand investigates how co-patenting over distance develops when aggregating inventive activities on a regional level. That means, the object of analysis is a link between two regions in contrast to other studies, where links between two individuals or firms are investigated. We...

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...