Academic patents in Germany

Within this study, we compare the patenting activities by universities and public research institutes in Germany. The crucial problem hereby is that a large share of patent filings from universities is registered by companies and the university staff only appears as an inventor. Therefore, improved approaches, which are also able to detect patent filings that have not been formally submitted by universities themselves, are needed in order to correctly identify the amount of university patents. Within the course of this analysis, we take both viewpoints, i.e. the "applicants' perspective" and the extended perspective of "academic patents", which takes university inventors into account.