Title: Investigating inventive productivity at Sweden's largest medical university

Authors: Charlotta Dahlborg; Danielle Lewensohn; Carl Johan Sundberg

Addresses: Department for Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), Karolinska Institutet, Tomtebodavägen 18A, 171 77, Stockholm, Sweden ' Department for Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), Karolinska Institutet, Tomtebodavägen 18A, 171 77, Stockholm, Sweden ' Department for Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), Karolinska Institutet, Tomtebodavägen 18A, 171 77, Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract: The evaluation of technology transfer activities by patents is a common approach to university benchmarking. However, the underlying counts are not always transparent or harmonised. The aim of this article is to explore different ways to measure inventive productivity. Based on the novel Karolinska Institutet Intellectual Property database (KIIP), we investigate inventive productivity at Sweden's largest medical university between 1995 and 2010. We find that the selection of different patent records affects the representation of inventive productivity. Moreover, our results show that an exclusive focus on number of patents rather than also including the number of inventions generates a considerably different result in terms of inventive productivity. Our results point to the need to critically review patent metrics applied by universities and policy makers to evaluate university technology transfer.

Keywords: academic patenting; inventive productivity; patent counts; invention; patent metrics; technology transfer; teacher exemptions; evaluation; commercialisation; university patenting; Sweden; benchmarking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTTC.2013.064154

International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation, 2013 Vol.12 No.1/2/3, pp.102 - 120

Received: 03 Jun 2013
Accepted: 14 Feb 2014
Published online: 10 Sep 2014 *

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