A central theme of university entrepreneurship—including the generation and commercialization of university-invented research—is academic patenting (referring to patenting by university scientists). This study explores organizational-, individual- and patent-level factors and their respective relationship with academic patenting. Based on a thorough investigation of all academic patents (that have at least one university scientist involved) from one of the largest Dutch research universities during the period 2000–2009, and further building on first-hand qualitative and quantitative data, the results show that Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) are instrumental in generating more academic patents. However, this effect is predominantly manifested by the increase in the number of patents patented under the name (solely or jointly) of the university (university-owned patents), far more than the increase in the absolute volume of patents invented by the university (university-invented patents). Further, regarding individual academic inventors, our study shows that, in general, male researchers and lead-inventors with higher academic rankings are less likely to abide by the TTOs, resulting in more patents being filed outside the university. Regarding the academic invention, the value of the patent itself does not seem to be related to the choice of the ownership (e.g., university-owned or not) of the patent.

大学创业的一个中心主题是学术专利（指大学科学家的专利），其中包括大学发明的研究的产生和商业化。这项研究探讨了组织，个人和专利层面的因素及其与学术专利的关系。根据对2000-2009年间荷兰最大的研究型大学之一的所有学术专利（至少涉及一名大学科学家）的彻底调查，并进一步基于第一手的定性和定量数据，结果表明：技术转让办公室（TTO）有助于产生更多的学术专利。但是，这种效果主要体现在以大学的名义（单独或共同）获得专利的专利数量增加了（大学拥有的专利），远远超过了大学发明的绝对专利量（大学创造的专利）的增长。此外，关于个人学术发明人，我们的研究表明，总体而言，具有较高学术排名的男性研究人员和主要发明人不太可能遵守TTO，从而导致在大学以外申请的专利更多。关于学术发明，专利本身的价值似乎与专利所有权（例如，大学拥有或不拥有）的选择无关。