Abolishment of the professor’s privilege and its impact on the university patent quality

Following the US, several European countries have changed legislation on intellectual property of university patents in 2000’s. Denmark, Germany, Austria, Norway and Finland canceled the “professor’s privilege” to own patents that are the result of their research at the university. These rights were...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Juraj Tichý, Štefan Rehák
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Belianum. Matej Bel University Press. 2025-06-01
Series:Ekonomika a Spoločnosť
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Online Access:https://ekonomikaaspolocnost.umb.sk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Paper-101-final_korPS.pdf
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Summary:Following the US, several European countries have changed legislation on intellectual property of university patents in 2000’s. Denmark, Germany, Austria, Norway and Finland canceled the “professor’s privilege” to own patents that are the result of their research at the university. These rights were transferred to the universities themselves. At the same time, the universities created an administrative system to ensure better protection of intellectual property and improve the commercial use of academic research. The aim of this article is to evaluate the impact of given reforms on the quality of patents created at universities. We use data on the quality of university patents that we identified in the OECD patents database from 1995-2011. As control group, we use Swedish universities, where the professor’s privilege continues. Since the monitored reforms have occurred in different periods of time, we use dynamic DiD approach that allows to analyze the impact on the quality of patents in individual years. By the results of our analyisis, in the fourth year after the reform, there is the increase in composite indicators 4 and 6. The increase in composite indicator 6 is also visible in the second year.
ISSN:2729-8213