2010-Sciento-Leydesdorff-The decline of university patenting and the end of the Bayh–Dole effect.pdfVIP

Scientometrics (2010) 83:355–362 DOI 10.1007/s11192-009-0001-6 The decline of university patenting and the end of the Bayh–Dole effect Loet Leydesdorff Æ Martin Meyer Received: 7 February 2009 / Published online: 10 June 2009 ´ ´ Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, Hungary 2009 Abstract University patenting has been heralded as a symbol of changing relations between universities and their social environments. The Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 in the USA was eagerly promoted by the OECD as a recipe for the commercialization of uni- versity research, and the law was imitated by a number of national governments. However, since the 2000s university patenting in the most advanced economies has been on the decline both as a percentage and in absolute terms. In addition to possible saturation effects and institutional learning, we suggest that the institutional incentives for university pat- enting have disappeared with the new regime of university ranking. Patents and spin-offs are not counted in university rankings. In the new arrangements of university–industry– government relations, universities have become very responsive to changes in their rele- vant environments. Keywords Patents Indicator Legislation Entrepreneurial university Triple Helix Mode-2 Introduction Proponents of the Triple Helix thesis (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000), Mode-2 (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny et al. 2001) and the thesis of the ‘‘entrepreneurial university’’ (Clark 1998; Etzkowitz 2002) have proclaimed a shift in the function of the university and accordingly a new social contract in university–industry–government relations (Graham L. Leydesdorff () Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: loet@ URL: M. Meyer SPRU, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK