Academic inventions and patents in the Netherlands: A case study on business sector exploitation

• Case study of exploitation of patents of university origin in The Netherlands.
• Extensive matching technique for identifying university inventors in patent applications.
• Results in IP based entrepreneurship at spin offs, SMEs and multinationals from a detailed questionnaire.
• Patent-inventor links confirmed at TTOs of universities.
• Conclusions similar to larger Europe-wide surveys, but also distinctive.

This paper describes a new methodology to identify patent applications based upon research at nine universities and three university medical centers in the Netherlands and a case study elaborating subsequent, scientifically research based, IP exploitation in several sectors. We address the identification and utilization of the intellectual property by domestic business enterprises and start ups based upon patents from university research. A sophisticated semi-automated data collection heuristic was adopted to identify all relevant university-invented patent applications that were filed between 2000 and 2010.In total 2898 patent applications based upon scientific research at universities and related to university inventions were identified. For 952 of these university inventions patent applications were filed by the universities themselves. The total number of university based related patent applications represent 5% of the total volume of patent applications from Dutch origin.A subsequent survey among companies exploiting university research based IP, was carried out to gather information on their actual use of their IP in terms of manpower involved in product or market development and estimated monetary value of the patents. 78 companies responded to this survey. The main findings reveal that a variety of IP exploitation strategies has been used. Overall, more than 50% of the patents still wait to be used for further development and innovations. The number of jobs created by spin offs from university research institutes is approximately 9500 jobs over a period of 10 years. Average revenues from these patents amounted to € 42,000. Several findings from our small-scale national survey on patent exploitation with regards to use and monetary values are in line with general results from the large-scale European PatVal survey and the APE-INV survey.