Academic inventors are university scientists who appear as designated inventors of patents whose assignee may be either a business company, their own academic institution, or a governmental administration. The paper analyses their relationships entertained with co?inventors, who may be either...

The economic literature on technical change has increasingly relied upon patent citation data to measure inter-personal knowledge flows. Many doubts exist on whether patent citations really reflect the designated inventors’ knowledge of both their technical fields, and of the other inventors...

The paper describes the methodogy used to build a database on academic inventors from France, Italy, and Sweden (1978-2004), which was delivered to the European Commission as part of the KEINS project (Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Networks and Systems), and will provide the...

In this paper we exploit new data on US inventors in Organic Chemistry, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotechnology to revisit the JTH test of the localization of knowledge spillovers (Jaffe, Trajtenberg, and Henderson; 1993). We find that inventors who patent across different companies contribute...

We investigate the scientific productivity of Italian academic inventors, namely academic researchers designated as inventors on patent applications to the European Patent Office, 1978-1999. We use a new longitudinal data set comprising 299 academic inventors, and as many matching controls...

Based on longitudinal data for a matched sample of 592 Italian academic inventors and controls, the paper explores the impact of patenting on university professors’ scientific productivity, as measured by publication and citation counts. Academic inventors (university professors who appear as...

The paper proposes a definition of “academic entrepreneur” which draws from draws from the economics, history, and sociology of science. Academic entrepreneurs are scientists with a brilliant scientific record, who build their careers through discipline-building, the creation and of new labs...

Notions of social capital have loomed large in the literature on academic careers, but it has proved difficult to disentangle the various benefits social capital bring to individual scientists. Besides, most of the relevant literature is quite US-centric and provide little clues on how the...

This article provides a critical discussion of the recent econometric literature on "localised knowledge spillovers" and the related notion of tacit knowledge. The basic claim of the article is that the increasing, and more or less automatic reliance of industrial geographers upon such...