Accounting for more than 10% of patent applications submitted to the European Patent Office (EPO) across Europe, European universities play a major role in innovation, although significant disparities remain when it comes to intellectual property and the commercialization of inventions.
A study recently published by the EPO’s Patent and Technology Observatory, in collaboration with Fraunhofer ISI, highlights the rise of universities in the field of patenting and invention monetization. The analysis is based on data from over 1,200 universities and their knowledge transfer offices (KTOs) covering two decades (2000 to 2020).
More than 1,200 European universities have contributed to a varied landscape of patent filings with the EPO. Germany leads the way in terms of the number of universities filing patents and the number of academic patents, followed by France, the UK and Italy. French universities are particularly active in this field.
However, this landscape remains dominated by a small group of very active universities (5%), which alone generate half of all university patents filed. The Université Grenoble Alpes ranks 2nd over the 2000-2020 period, alongside such prestigious institutions as the Technical University of Munich, Oxford University, ETH Zurich, the University of Copenhagen and the Politecnico di Milano.
