The role of academia in fostering technology transfer and economic growth is now considered a key element of national science and technology policies. Starting from the PhD thesis, my researches aimed to understand the behaviour of academia in front of such new environmental pressures and uncovered a detailed account of the patenting activity in Italian universities, its national legislation, its university-level rules and practices, the faculty opinions, and the relations between all these factors. Some results contained in this book are new (and were more at the time the researches were originally conducted), some are not but the novelty lies in the specific setting in which they are inspected (there is an increasing view that the successful US model cannot simply be exported in different cultures and economic environments). Replication per se is an important value of science that has high consideration, but unfortunately little application. Finally, an important peculiarity of this contribution lies in the global overview through which the phenomenon is presented, including so many different perspectives. First, the collection of the regulations issued by Italian universities since 1993 to manage the IP issue provides insight into the organisational context at each institutions. Then, a collection of the patent applications filed by Italian universities since 1964 provides a measure of the formal involvement of faculty and university in patenting activity. Finally, two surveys to the patenting and to the non-patenting researchers working in the same disciplines provide insights into the faculty perceptions regarding the motivation and the environment (problems, potential improvements) for the patenting activity. Special attention is dedicated to respondents which report to having reasoned about (and possibly engaged in) patenting activity, but which finally gave up before any patent could be filed. It is impossible to recap here the several findings contained in the book. Among others, the reader shall find: an impressive review of the literature (more than 300 papers reviewed!!!, with a special focus on the potential problems from the patenting and licensing activity of the university, an issue that has been quite overlooked by past reviews), a dynamic view of institutional isomorphism, the prevalence of the academic management system over changes in IP legislation for patenting activity, the dependence of the motivations to patent or not on research area and gender and potentially on other characteristics for which I did not control, the use of different sources and different perspective in analysing a research topic in order to assess potential response biases owing to inconsistent responses in the surveys, a model investigating the effect that the individual perceptions have on patents (thus bridging a micro and a macro perspective that, on the contrary, are largely being treated as separated), etc…
