University Autonomy, the Professor Privilege and Academic Patenting: Italy, 1996-2007

Using data on patent applications at the European Patent Office, we search for trends in academic patenting in Italy, 1996-2007. During this time, Italian universities underwent a radical reform process, which granted them autonomy, and were confronted with a change in IP legislation, which introduced the professor privilege. We find that although the absolute number of academic patents has increased, (i) their weight on total patenting by domestic inventors has not, while (ii) the share of academic patents owned by universities has more than tripled. By means of a set of probit regressions, we show that the conditional probability to observe an academic patent has declined over time. We also find that the rise of university ownership is explained, significantly albeit not exclusively, by the increased autonomy of Italian universities, which has allowed them to introduce explicit IP regulations concerning their staff's inventions. The latter has effectively neutralized the introduction of the professor privilege.