A new study published by the European Patent Office (EPO) in November 2020 shows that European universities and public research organizations use European patents as the main instrument to exploit their inventions commercially. It finds that these institutions already exploit more than a third (36%) of their inventions, with another 42% of their inventions planned to be exploited.
The study, entitled “Valorisation of scientific results – Patent commercialisation scoreboard: European universities and public research organisations“, further finds that licensing is by far the preferred channel of commercialisation (accounting for 70% of the commercialisation of inventions), followed by R&D co-operation (14%) and the sale of patents (9%).
