When Do Universities Own Their Patents? An Explorative Study of Patent Characteristics and Organizational Determinants in Germany

University-invented patents are often not owned by the university. Empirical knowledge about factors affecting the ownership of university patents is limited and mainly focuses on patent characteristics. To study how the ownership of German university patents (2006--2007) relates to patent and university-level performance indicators, we matched PatStat data with a register of German professors. Four to five years after the abolition of the professors' privilege, universities on average owned more than half of all patents on faculty inventions. General and technical universities differ in how patent ownership relates to patent and university characteristics.