University Patenting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: a Comparative Analysis

University Patenting inWales, Scotland andNorthern Ireland: aComparative AnalysisAndrew Beale, David Blackaby and Lynn Mainwaring,Swansea University

Abstract

Using data on the patent portfolios of UK universities, the paper compares thelevels of patenting activity (filings), success (grants) and quality (patents withcommercial co-assignees and patent citations) atWelsh, Scottish and NorthernIrish institutions. Patent activity, per researcher, inWales is on a par with thatin Scotland and about twice the rate in Northern Ireland, but the numbers ofresearchers relative to population in Wales and Northern Ireland are aroundhalf of the number in Scotland. Patent quality indicators are less favourable toWales, while both activity levels and conversion of applications into grants arepoor in Northern Ireland. It is suggested that greater cross-university collabo-ration inWales and Northern Ireland would help improve performance.

Introduction

The creation of knowledge-rich economies is a global phenomenonimpelled, in part, by the continued liberalisation of world trade, andreinforced and rewarded by the strengthening of world law in intellectualproperty rights. In many countries, universities have been recognised asimportant repositories and generators of knowledge of commercial valueand their research ‘missions’ have been extended beyond the creation ofoutputs as freely available public goods. The new technologies and newideas that are transferred out of a university tend to have a dispropor-tionate impact on the institution’s economic hinterland (Audretsch andLehmann, 2005). Thus both national and regional governments andagencies have assumed an interest in the stimulation and transfer ofcommercially valuable university research.

Higher Education Quarterly, 0951–5224Volume 62, Nos. 1/2, January/April 2008, pp 101–119

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4, 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,USA.

This paper reports unique data that provide insights into the com-parative extent and effectiveness of university patenting in three UKregions/nations: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. These regionsare of interest in themselves because they are three distinct elements ofthe UK devolutionary settlement (Cooke and Clifton, 2005) followingthe establishment of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly in1999 (devolution in Northern Ireland has been in flux over this period,for well known political reasons). Over the coming decades, observerswill be able to assess the extent to which the differing degrees of politicaland economic autonomy and styles of government succeed in deliveringimprovements in the economic performance of these peripheral regions.Devolution is, however, imposed on different cultures and historicallegacies, economic, political, legal and intellectual. So the gathering ofbaseline data is critical to the running of this natural experiment.

The core of the paper consists of increasingly refined patent produc-tivity comparisons for individual institutions – refined in the sense thatthe measures more effectively capture innovations of commercial value.The measures are, respectively: patent filings, patent grants, patentshaving a commercial co-assignee, and patent citations. A brief attemptis made in the final section to place the main findings into a broadercontext.

From a regional perspective, the significance of university patentoutputs is that they provide information on an important component ofthe region’s innovation system. An innovation system is the mix of formaland informal institutions and policies geared to the creation and exploi-tation of new knowledge, a concept widely applied at the regional level(Cooke, Heidenreich and Braczyk, 2004). Devolved government hasallowed a degree of discretion in the development of the innovationsystems in the three regions.They, nevertheless, remain nested within thenational (UK) system and it will be useful to begin with an account ofrecent relevant policy developments at that level.

University patenting: the policy framework

In the UK, rights to intellectual property arising from university researchwere formerly granted to a government corporation, the British Tech-nology Group, but were ceded to the universities themselves in 1983.Although this gave institutions greater freedom to develop intellectualproperty portfolios, it was not until the mid-1990s that patenting activity‘took off’ (as measured by patent applications; Beale, 2005). In thisrespect, the UK has lagged a considerable way behind the USA. There,

102 Higher Education Quarterly

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

universities have generated rapid growth in patents following the 1980Bayh-Dole Act which allowed universities to patent findings that weregenerated from federally funded research (Jaffe, 2000).

Concerns about the potential conflicts between commercialisationand the traditional missions of universities (see, e.g., Owen-Smith andPowell, 2001; Poyago-Theotoky, Beath and Siegel, 2002; Stephan et al.,2007) have been common to both countries and it is more likely that thetardy UK response has been the result of weaker incentives for academicstaff to become involved in commercial activity. That, at least, seems tobe one of the basic premises of a series of recent policy reviews onuniversity business links.

A report on the commercialisation of public-sector science (NationalAudit Office (NAO), 2002, pp. 22) noted that ‘insufficient “kudos”attaches to filing a patent’, and accordingly recommended the strength-ening of incentives. Building on the Baker Report (HM Treasury, 1999),it advocated that research establishments (either the discipline-basedResearch Councils or those, primarily universities, in receipt of researchcouncil funding) should aim to develop, either individually or in collabo-ration, a critical mass of intellectual property so as ‘to take advantage ofthe incremental nature of most research’ (NAO, 2002, pp. 28). TheReport’s plea for stronger incentives was answered in the Science andInnovation Framework, 2004–2014 (HM Treasury, 2004), which led tothe Higher Education Innovation Fund for England and NorthernIreland, accompanied by a similar boosting of third-mission funding inScotland and Wales.

Of course, the creation and exploitation of intellectual property isnot the only avenue for university business technology transfer. Studentsponsorships, research contracts and consultancy, and business spin-outs are alternatives. Nevertheless, official reports put considerableemphasis on intellectual property. The Lambert Review of business-university collaboration (HM Treasury, 2003) questioned the quality,longevity and employment-generating potential of university spin-outsand recommended greater emphasis on licensing as a means ofcommercialisation.

This stress on intellectual property has not been uncontroversial. Intheir overview of European university patenting, Guena and Nesta(2006) single out the NAO (2002) report for its uncritical advocacy ofthe intellectual property route. They argue that patent success is highlyskewed, thanks to a small number of very successful patents, and thatmost university technology transfer offices in the USA and Europe earnlittle or no income from the sale or licensing of intellectual property.The

University Patenting 103


uneven commercial success of patents was, though, one of the reasonswhy the NAO report recommended the creation of institutional portfo-lios of sufficient mass. As for the overall returns to intellectual property,the Higher Education-Business and Community Interaction Survey, 2004–2006 (Higher Education Funding Councils, 2007) reports that between2000–2001 and 2005–2006, aggregate annual revenues of UK universi-ties varied between £40 and £58 million, compared to costs of between£13 and £17 million. A breakdown by standard statistical region for2005–2006 shows revenues exceeding costs for Wales and Scotland andfor all but one English region (the North East). For Northern Ireland,however, revenues were considerably less than costs.

The implication is that potential rewards are available from patentassets but thought needs to be given to their effective management; inparticular, applications need to be pursued on a carefully selected basis.Thus, without denying the importance of other forms of technologytransfer, a comparative analysis of university patent holdings is of inter-est, not only to individual universities as a means of benchmarkingperformance, but also to regional governments aiming to exploit univer-sity generated knowledge as part of their knowledge-economy andscience policy strategies. These strategies, following UK policy impera-tives all stress the importance of university technology commercialisation(see, e.g., Scottish Executive, 2001a, b; Welsh Assembly Government,2004, 2006; Hewitt-Dundas, Roper and Love 2007).

The data

The Higher Education-Business and Community Interaction Surveyscontain aggregated data on universities’ self-reported intellectual prop-erty holdings from 2000–2001. The data presented in this paper comefrom a different source. They were commissioned from MicroPatentProfessional Services by IP Wales, a Welsh Assembly Governmentbusiness-support initiative (Beale, 2005).The data relate to patent filingsand patent grants in the years 1983–2005 for all higher education insti-tutions inWales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Irelandand for all (16) English members of the self-selected ‘Russell Group’ ofleading research universities. For the purposes of this paper, theseEnglish universities are generally excluded since they are not represen-tative of overall university performance in England (though occasionalbenchmark comparisons are made to the 15 of these having science andtechnology faculties). Universities in the Republic of Ireland are also



generally excluded from detailed consideration because other aspects ofthe comparison (notably staff counts) are not obtainable on a consistentbasis.

Unlike the patent information published by the Higher EducationFunding Councils (2007), the present data are reported for individualinstitutions, with separate counts for the five main national and interna-tional patent offices. Patents with commercial co-assignees are individu-ally identified, and supplementary information is provided on patentclasses and citation rates. The five offices are: Europe (EPO), GreatBritain (UKPO), Japan (JPO), United States (USPTO) and the WorldIntellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) via the Patent CooperationTreaty (PCT). Patent applications were not separately published byUSPTO prior to 2000; thus for 1983–1999 only patent grants arecounted. It is perfectly possible to apply for a patent in individualcountries other than those stated but such applications are excludedfrom the data. However, patents granted by EPO, JPO, USPTO and viathe PCT are generally regarded as high-value patents. Publication ofdocuments typically lags behind filings by 18 months and, for thisreason, the data, which were collected in 2005, are incomplete for theperiod 2003–2005.

It has been claimed (e.g., Saragossi and van Pottelsberghe de laPotterie, 2003) that university patent holdings underestimate thenumber of patented inventions generated by universities. The universityportfolios in Beale (2005) were assembled by including documents onwhich the institutions were named as an assignee (owner) or co-assigneeand documents that, regardless of the assignee name, were ‘familymembers’ of the university assigned documents. In principle, a familyconsists of a priority application (the first application to be filed) andsubsequent applications in different patent offices on the same invention(citing the priority). However, as Dernis, Guellec and van Pottelsberghe(2001) explain, matters can be rather complicated in reality, with appli-cations citing multiple priorities or different applications citing the samepriority, both suggestive of a degree of ‘downstream’ development of theoriginal invention.The definition used here is due to International PatentDocumentation Center (a database now maintained by EPO), in whichall patents with common priorities are regarded as belonging to a singlefamily. When a document within a family was not assigned to a univer-sity, its probable institutional source was inferred by examining the restof the family members. Family expansion increased institutional patentattributions by 23 per cent, going some way towards meeting the con-cerns of Saragossi and van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie (2003).



Patents are a measure of technology outputs. To compare productiv-ity, an input measure is needed. This is taken to consist of counts ofacademic staff in schools/departments in the sciences and engineering inthe research-oriented ‘pre-1992’ universities, that is, those institutionsin possession of a university charter before the abolition of the ‘binarydivide’ in 1992 which allowed polytechnics to claim university status.These counts are obtained from submissions to the 2001 ResearchAssessment Exercise (Higher Education Research Opportunities, 2002;the Research Assessment Exercise is undertaken at 5–7 year intervalsas a means of informing the distribution of public research funds touniversities). The pre-1992 universities all have an explicit researchmission and submit returns in all, or nearly all, relevant Research Assess-ment Exercise ‘units of assessment’, or disciplines. This is not true ofmost of the post-1992 universities, or former polytechnics, whose com-paratively weak research capabilities lead them to concentrate submis-sions in the few areas where they hope to make an impact. Thus, entireschools/departments may fail to leave any trace in the Research Assess-ment Exercise returns. Aggregate regional outputs, but not inputs,of post-1992 universities and other higher education institutions arereported below. Of the 68 units of assessment, 27 are considered here toqualify as science and engineering and, therefore, to be patent-relevant.

One of the problems of using the Research Assessment Exercise isthat only the staff deemed to be ‘research active’ is submitted. For thepurpose of evaluating university patent productivity it is preferable toinclude all staff (in fact, even the many Research Assessment Exerciserankings published in the UK education media are adjusted for theproportion of staff submitted). The returns do not give the exact pro-portion of research active to total staff but do give proportions within(six) bands. By using the midpoints of these bands, the reportednumbers can be scaled up to yield an estimate of the total staff comple-ment for each unit of assessment for each institution.These estimates arereported in Table 1 for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland on anabsolute and per capita basis (using the 2001 Census of Population).

These estimates are of interest in their own right as indicators of theuniversity based innovative potential in each region and, in that respect,Table 1 tells a striking story. The number of academic staff based in thescience and engineering departments of pre-1992 universities relative topopulation is nearly twice as high in Scotland as it is inWales and NorthernIreland. When adjusted for quality (by weighting staff according to theappropriate Research Assessment Exercise ranking) there is a marginalchange – in Scotland’s favour: research mass there is over twice as high as



it is inWales.Whatever the patent productivity measures show, the fact isthat Welsh universities have been attempting to compete on the basis ofhalf the resources of Scotland.This picture is unlikely to be distorted as aresult of the exclusion of the post-1992 universities, as is implied by thefact that these institutions account for 8.5 per cent of Scottish patentfilings compared to 4.5 per cent forWales and zero for Northern Ireland.

Patent filings

For Scotland, there is considerable variation in filings productivity,with Strathclyde, at 1.1 filings per member, markedly ahead of theother institutions (Table 2). Unlike Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh andGlasgow, Strathclyde does not have a medical school but it does have apharmacy department (for comparison, filings per member of the EnglishRussell Group universities is 0.59).There is a substantial difference in theperformances of Scotland’s two Russell Group members, Edinburgh andGlasgow. Edinburgh, which has Scotland’s largest concentration ofscience and engineering academics, has a filings productivity barely abovethat of the two smallest groupings (among pre-1992 universities), St.Andrews and Stirling. Among the new institutions, Glasgow Caledonianand Napier College accounted for 65 of the 129 filings. Only 1 per cent ofapplications were filed in Japan and only 10 per cent at UKPO (presum-ably because UK protection can also be had via EPO and WIPO).

For Wales, there is a clear-cut difference between Cardiff University(including, for our purposes, the University ofWales College of Medicinewith which it is now merged) and the other three pre-1992 universities.Cardiff accounted for 375 (74 per cent) of the 507 filings from Welshinstitutions and has a productivity rate twice as high as its neighbours. Inpost-1992 institutions, 22 of the 27 filings by came from Glamorgan

TABLE 1University research staff numbers

All staffa All staffper capita

Researchmassb

Research massper capita

Wales 932 0.32 562.4 0.19Scotland 3,146 0.62 2045.1 0.40Northern Ireland 660 0.39 337.1 0.20

Note: Per capita figures derived using 2001 Census of Population.a Estimate of all pre-1992 university staff in 27 Research Assessment Exercise units ofassessment.b Research-active staff of pre-1992 universities in 27 Research Assessment Exercise units ofassessment weighted on a scale 0, . . . , 6.



University.Thanks to Cardiff,Wales’s overall old-university productivityexceeds that of Scotland: 0.52 per member compared to 0.44. Thedistribution of patent office applications is broadly similar to that ofScotland except for a greater concentration in UKPO, possibly reflectingless confidence in the global value of the innovations.

TABLE 2Patent filings and filings productivity per member of staff by patent

office (PO), 1983–2005

Institutiona Staffb EPO UKPO JPO USPTO WIPO All All/Staff

ScotlandAberdeen 321 52 15 0 38 73 178 0.56Dundee 350 75 19 4 53 105 256 0.73Edinburgh 917 43 13 1 39 66 162 0.18Glasgow 683 96 28 5 89 110 328 0.48Ht-Watt 300 19 13 2 13 22 69 0.23St. Andrews 146 3 1 1 1 2 8 0.06Stirling 90 2 1 0 0 2 5 0.06Strathclyde 339 117 29 6 94 129 375 1.11

Total(pre-1992)

3,146 417 119 19 327 509 1,381 0.44

Post-1992 33 26 0 21 49 129Total (All) 440 145 19 348 558 1510PO shares 29% 10% 1% 23% 37% 100%

WalesA’ystwyth 109 9 10 0 5 14 38 0.35Bangor 128 11 1 0 5 15 32 0.25Cardiff 557 97 60 5 86 127 375 0.67Swansea 138 9 9 0 4 13 35 0.25

Total(pre-1992)

932 126 80 5 100 169 480 0.52

Post-1992 7 7 1 6 6 27Total (All) 133 87 6 106 175 507PO shares 26% 17% 1% 21% 36% 100%

Northern IrelandBelfast 473 42 11 0 34 51 138 0.29Ulster 187 13 1 0 8 19 41 0.22

Total (All) 660 55 12 0 42 70 179 0.27PO shares 31% 7% 0% 23% 39% 100%a Patent filings are reported, individually for pre-1992 universities and collectively forpost-1992 universities and other higher education institutions.b Staff numbers in the relevant Research Assessment Exercise units of assessment (pre-1992 universities, only).EPO, Europe; UKPO, Great Britain; JPO, Japan; USPTO, United States; WIPO, WorldIntellectual Property Organisation; PO.



For Northern Ireland, there is little difference between Belfast andUlster, except for scale. The overall rate of 0.27 filings per memberis comparatively low. There is also a greater propensity to use multi-country routes (EPO and WIPO).

For two of the regions,Wales and Scotland, information is also avail-able, at the regional level, on the types of invention that are beingpatented. As a route to commercialisation, patents are particularlyfavoured in the medical sciences and especially pharmaceuticals. Scot-land is well endowed with medical schools and pharmacy departmentswhereas (at the time the data were collected) Wales had just one of each(both at Cardiff). Interestingly, this does not seem to be reflected by thedistribution of patents across the International Patent Classification classlevels. Of the 110 classes, eight account for over three quarters of thefilings in the dataset (Table 3).While Wales trails Scotland and Englandin filings per researcher in class A61, which includes pharmaceuticals, itperforms well in organic chemistry (C07) and biochemistry (C12, whichincludes genetic engineering). In relative terms,Wales’s weakness is mostpronounced in sections G and H, electronics and communications.

Patent grants

Patent filings may be a useful measure of the level of commerciallyoriented research activity, but their utility as a measure of the value ofoutcomes of that activity is compromised by the fact that application

TABLE 3The distribution of patent filings by international patent class

Patent class % of allfilingsa

Filings per researcher

Wales Scotland Englandb

A61 Medical science 22.2 0.099 0.108 0.132C07 Organic Chemistry 9.5 0.071 0.038 0.056C12 Microbiology 16.4 0.107 0.070 0.098G01 Measuring, testing 13.7 0.091 0.086 0.073G02 Optics 3.0 0.003 0.013 0.019G06 Computing 3.7 0.014 0.017 0.023H01 Electrical 5.4 0.008 0.031 0.032H04 Telecomms. 2.4 0.001 0.018 0.013All other classes 23.7 0.150 0.099 0.141a Per cent of filings for Welsh, Scottish and English Russell Group universities. Figures forNorthern Irish universities are not separately available.b Russell Group universities only.



success rates may vary from institution to institution. The data providesome insights into these variations. For EPO, it is possible to comparefilings over the period 1983–2005 with the number of grants.This is notthe same as showing how many applications over that period went on to begranted since recent applications may be granted after 2005. Neverthe-less, given the length of the period, the ‘issuance ratio’ (the ratio of patentsgranted to applications not granted) gives a good indicator of overallsuccess (Table 4).The same can be done for US data but only for the years2000–2005, the shorter period giving a less robust measure of success.

For some institutions, the small numbers involved suggest that theissuance rates should be treated with caution. Among the more activeinstitutions, Strathclyde again stands out. Not only does it have thehighest filings rate but it also (on the basis of EPO and USPTO data) hasthe highest issuance rates. The overall rates for Wales and Scotland aresimilar, though those for Northern Ireland are markedly lower. It isinteresting that issuance rates are higher for US applications than thosefor EPO, suggesting either that US criteria are easier to satisfy, or thatthey are subject to shorter lags, or both.

The ranking of institutions based on the total number of patentsat EPO and USPTO for 1983–2005 and the corresponding (granted)patent productivity rate is close to that based on filings productivity;suggesting that, as cross section data, filings may not, in fact, be a poormeasure of outcomes (Table 5). This may not be true over time, asuniversities become more experienced and more selective about whatinventions to patent. (For comparison, the productivity rate for the eliteEnglish universities is 0.14.)

Patent collaboration

Universities can develop patents on their own, in collaboration withindustrial partners, or in collaboration with other universities and publicresearch bodies. Evidence from Belgian universities (Sapsalis and vanPottelsberghe, 2007) suggests that having a commercial co-assignee hasa weakly significant positive effect on patent value, while co-assignmentwith other universities and public research organisations has a stronglysignificant positive effect.

The present data show considerably more instances of commercial(compared to intra-university) collaboration and these are discussedfirst. Commercial cooperation in patent activity was low in the earlyyears for most institutions (Table 6; and the data for 1983–1992 arecompacted in the table) but has grown steadily on average since then.



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Table 6 attributes to each institution patents with commercial assigneesand co-assignees that have been identified according to the patent-familydefinition, and illustrates how performances have changed over time.Theaverage, however, conceals idiosyncratic patterns for a few institutions,casting fresh light on the outcomes related above.The last three columnsof Table 6 show: the total count for the entire period; the count for theperiod end (2000–2005); and the ratio of end count to total count. Theratio gives a rough indication of whether or not institutional activity isaccelerating or declining relative to other institutions.

Perhaps the most surprising results are those for Strathclyde. Itwas noted above that this university has high total filings and highEPO/USPTO patent grants; in both cases higher than Glasgow. Yet,as reported in Table 6, its portfolio of patents with commercialco-assignees, for the entire period, is somewhat smaller than that of

TABLE 5European and US patents (1983–2005) and patent productivity

Total patent grants Patents/Staff

ScotlandAberdeen 38 0.12Dundee 52 0.15Edinburgh 34 0.04Glasgow 83 0.12Heriot-Watt 15 0.05St Andrews 0 0.0Stirling 0 0.0Strathclyde 138 0.41

Total (pre-1992) 360 0.11Post-1992 21

Total all 381

WalesAberystwyth 9 0.08Bangor 6 0.05Cardiff 93 0.17Swansea 6 0.04

Total (pre-1992) 114 0.12Post-1992 7

Total all 121

Northern IrelandBelfast 29 0.06Ulster 5 0.03

Total 34 0.05



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Glasgow and Cardiff and only a little larger than that of Dundee. Yetmore remarkable is that most of Strathclyde’s documents refer to yearsprior to 2000; only 24 per cent are post-2000 (about half the Scottishaverage). Note also that the previous ranking of Edinburgh andGlasgow is reversed when it comes to the end count: total count ratio.Three quarters of Edinburgh’s patents with commercial co-assigneesare post-2000 compared to fewer than half for Glasgow. The late start-ers catching up is also evident from the results for the post-1992 Scot-tish institutions, for which 82 per cent of such patents relate to the last5 years.

Cardiff, like Strathclyde, also seems to have stalled drastically. Overthe entire period, Cardiff outperforms all other institutions (Table 6).Yetonly seven of its 45 documents relate to the end period. It might bethought that the fall off in commercial collaboration at Cardiff, Strath-clyde (and also Aberdeen) reflects a change in commercialisation strat-egy but, if so, it goes very much against the trend of the leading UKresearch universities. The end count: total count ratio for the EnglishRussell group, as a whole is 0.63, while that for the three leading UKscience and technology universities (Oxford, Cambridge and ImperialCollege) is 0.76.

The figures for Northern Ireland are dominated by Belfast which hasmuch in common with Edinburgh and the post-1992 Scottish institu-tions and is pretty much a mirror image of Cardiff: 80 per cent of itspatent attributions are from the end period. For the last 5 years the totalcount for the region exceeded that of Wales.

Insofar as any slowing down of commercial collaboration in patentingis a problem, it is clearly more of a concern forWales.The fall in Cardiff’snumbers has not been made good by the remaining universities.To be ona par with Scotland in per capita terms,Welsh outputs need to be at leasthalf of those for Scotland.Yet for this kind of patent, the ratio stands atabout one third for the entire period and around a quarter for the last5 years.

When it comes to collaboration with other universities, a similarpicture emerges. The patent filings documents reveal 10 instances ofco-assignment between universities in Scotland and 34 between Scottishuniversities and English members of the Russell Group (including sixwith triple assignment). There were, by contrast, zero intra-Wales col-laborations and only seven (all from Cardiff) with other Russell Groupuniversities. For Northern Ireland, the corresponding figures are zeroand two.There was no evidence of collaboration between universities inNorthern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.



Patent citation analysis

When a patent or application is published it may serve as a reference forinventions that are subsequently filed by the same inventor or others. Ifan inventor or an examiner makes reference to an earlier patent docu-ment, some technical relationship is implied, but the nature of thatrelationship may vary. The earlier work may be similar or it may be adifferent solution to the problem that is addressed by the newapplication. If a patent has had a significant impact on a technical field,the number of times it is cited by others will tend to be higher. Self-citation (by the inventor or assignee) implies continued research anddevelopment investment in the technical area. Citation by others impliessome recognition of technical reliance on or advancement over the priorwork.

Naturally, one would expect citation frequency to increase with theage of the patent since the opportunity for citation increases with time.It is also the case that citation practices vary across patent offices, withmuch higher frequencies being recorded on USPTO documents. Sincethe percentages of filings in the USPTO are very similar for the threenations/regions (Table 2), this effect can be ignored. Citations datahave been compiled for EPO, USPTO and WIPO documents as partof an analysis of the full set of documents including those of EnglishRussell Group and Republic of Ireland universities. The mean citationrate for the entire collection is 0.25 citations per patent. A simplesummary comparator is provided by the proportion of documentshaving citations in excess of two standard deviations above the mean.Scottish documents at 3 per cent are above the two standard deviationthreshold compared to 4 per cent for Wales and 1 per cent for (All-)Ireland.

If this seems good from aWelsh perspective, more troubling is that thecitation frequency in that region has been consistently low from 2000onwards. Although one expects lower average frequencies for newerdocuments, among the newer documents higher rates do predict inno-vations of emerging interest. What is apparent is that both Scottish and(All-) Irish universities are generating documents of emerging interestwhileWelsh universities are signally failing in that regard. Although meancitation rates for this restricted period are close to zero for all threeregions, the two standard deviation markers are 3.9 for Scotland, 2.1 forIreland and only 0.7 for Wales. This echoes the remarkable downturn,noted in Table 6, in patent families with commercial co-assignees atCardiff compared with, say, Belfast and Edinburgh.



Implications and conclusions

This paper’s focus on patents is not intended to deny the importance ofother means of transferring ideas from universities or of obtainingrevenue streams from business. Even so, the brief review of UK technol-ogy policy makes clear the importance central government places oncommercialisation through the development of intellectual propertyrights, and this is echoed in the economic strategy and science policydocuments of the devolved administrations.

The significant differences to emerge from the data, at least betweenScotland and Wales, relate not to the main quantity measures relativeto the number of researchers (filings and grants) but to quality mea-sures (gross numbers of patent collaborations, the growth of commer-cial collaborations, and recent citations) and they echo findings onpatenting from industry itself. Moore and Mainwaring (2006) showthat, in the production sector, Welsh firms are at least as likely toengage in patenting as their Scottish counterparts but are less likely tohold patent clusters that typically arise from innovation routes withongoing potential. For Northern Ireland, not only are the quantitymeasures poor but the very low rate of conversion of applications intogrants is a matter of particular concern (see also, Hewitt-Dundas,Roper and Love, 2007). Recall that Northern Ireland is one of the fewUK regions not to profit from the commercialisation of universityintellectual property. It is very likely that these poor returns to com-mercialisation are closely connected to failure to reach the grant stage,and implies a rather indiscriminate approach to application selection.There is some suggestion of recent growth in outputs at Belfast but,overall, the picture is discouraging.

The quantity comparisons become less favourable to Wales andNorthern Ireland when they are related to total population rather thanresearcher numbers and reflect a historical legacy of high investment inhigher education in Scotland (relative to the whole of the UK). In thisrespect, Scotland has been favoured by the application, since 1979, of theTreasury’s ‘Barnett formula’ for allocating government expenditure toWales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. According to Mackay (2006),Scotland receives 7 per cent more per capita than Wales, even though itsgross value added per capita is 17 per cent higher. Northern Ireland’seven more favourable treatment is a result of its political ‘troubles’. Thenumber of universities in Scotland also appears to help maintain stabilityin patenting performance, with emerging weaknesses in some institu-tions being offset by growing strengths in others. In Wales and Northern



Ireland, the dominance of Cardiff and Belfast are potential sources ofvolatility.

In assessing these findings for the three regions, it is important to takeaccount of the different sizes of the regional economies and the numberof universities they are host to. In relation to the first, university tech-nology spillovers tend to be localised but transfer can only be effected ifthe local economy is capable of absorbing the inventions. It has beensuggested (Hewitt-Dundas, Roper and Love, 2007) that business expen-diture on research and development is a good proxy for the capacity toabsorb university technology outputs. In 2004, business spending onresearch and development in Scotland was £494 million, over twice thatin Wales (£226 million) and over four times that in Northern Ireland(£116 million; Statswales, 2007). A small private research base isunlikely to sustain sufficient mass in each of the disciplines offered by(even a small number of) universities to benefit from the inventions ofthose disciplines.

On the other hand, where absorptive capacity is high, a larger univer-sity research base is beneficial in allowing the development of large,risk-spreading patent portfolios, as recommended by the NAO (2002).Indeed, that report suggests that institutions ‘may benefit from combin-ing to create a significant body of intellectual property . . . in the same,or similar, market or geographical sectors’. Not only is this an optionmore readily available to universities in Scotland on account of the sheersize of its higher education sector, it is a route that they seem more eagerto pursue, on the evidence of intra-university patent collaboration aswell as other co-operative projects such as the web-portal ‘university-technology.com’ set up by all 13 universities to promote licensingopportunities.

Scotland does, of course, have mature national institutions like theRoyal Society of Edinburgh, to promote the interests of higher educationand help cement cooperation, but it might have been thought thatsomething similar would have happened in Wales as a result of univer-sities’ membership of the federal University of Wales. However, evenbefore the weakening of that body through the secession of Cardiff, itbetrayed no willingness or ability to help formulate an all-Wales researchstrategy, let alone coordinate the development of multi-institution patentportfolios and promote collaborative commercialisation. Wales’s newscience policy (Welsh Assembly Government, 2006) stresses the need forimproved commercialisation of university research but offers little stra-tegic insight into how this might be done. Given the relative smallness ofits higher education sector and three of its four pre-1992 universities,



there is surely a case for adopting the NAO recommendation to create acombined body of intellectual property. For Northern Ireland, optionshave been more limited on account of its size and recent troubled history.It may now become possible for its universities to develop strongercollaborative links to their counterparts in the Republic and to takeadvantage of the recent rapid growth of the Irish economy.

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank Marc Clement, Iwan Davies, Peter Sloane andtwo anonymous referees for their useful comments, and Julie Allan whohelped in the preparation of the data.

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University Patenting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: a Comparative Analysis