The past decade has witnessed a second academic revolution with the new role of contributing to economic growth and social development assigned to universities. A real phenomenon embedded in this new role is the right given to universities to file for a patent protection over publicly funded research and the possibility to retain financial returns from its license or selling. The aim of this thesis is to better understand this phenomenon and its relationship to scientific production.<p><p>Starting with the role patents pay in stimulating innovation, Chapter 2 assesses the cost of rewarding and enforcing exclusive patent rights in Europe and discusses implications for patenting at universities.<p><p>Chapter 3 aims to document patenting at universities in Belgium by applying the definition of university-invented patents. It challenges the ‘European Paradox’, the view that despite being good in producing science, European research institutions are not successful in transferring it to the real economy.<p><p>Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the relationship between patenting and scientific productivity. Chapter 4 questions the critique that patenting at universities may have a detrimental effect on scientific progress. Chapter 5 challenges the view that knowledge diversity increases group ability to innovate. It further enhances our understanding of how different ways of achieving diversity affect team inventive performance.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This PhD thesis takes a ’micro’ perspective on the production of higher education and research. More precisely, I use tools of industrial organization to study two individual institutions involved in their production process. The second chapter studies universities, the main producers of higher education and research, and the third and fourth chapters analyze scientific journals, which are central in the production and the dissemination of science. Besides being crucial nodes in the production and transmission of<p>knowledge, these institutions, interestingly, share other common characteristics: they both emerged before the Industrial Revolution, their importance increased over the centuries and they seem unavoidable today, and many actors are private not-for-profit. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished