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Organisational Change and the Institutionalisation of University Patenting Activity in Italy

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Abstract

As universities are increasingly called by their national governments for a more entrepreneurial management of public research results, they started to develop internal structures and policies to take a proactive role in the commercialisation of university research. For the first time, this paper presents a detailed chronicle of how country-level reforms on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) were translated into organisation-level mechanisms to regulate university-patenting activity. The analysis is based on the complete list of patent policies issued between 1993 and 2009 by the population of Italian universities. Our evidence suggests that universities first dealt with legislative changes on IPRs by enacting isomorphic behaviours, then by creating a community of practices, and finally by leveraging on such community to influence government reforms on IP-related matters. We discuss our results in the light of institutional theory and public policy.

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Notes

  1. Starting from the 1980s, the concept of New Public Management depicts a broad movement for the public research towards managerial instruments that are already successfully used in the private sector, with particular reference to performance management systems (Lindgren 2001).

  2. Universities with at least one technical department and/or school, such as engineering, architecture, mathematics, medicine, veterinary medicine, science, physics, and chemistry (www.nsf.gov/nsb/stem/).

  3. The professor’s privilege exempts academics from standard rules related to IPRs, and grants patents to the inventors rather than to the employers.

  4. See, e.g., Zomer et al. (2010) for previous use of this perspective in the research commercialization domain.

  5. In 2010, the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System started its operations. While its role and functions had been set since 2006, it took two Governments and four years of discussion to define its composition and fine-tune its mission (Moscati and Vaira 2008).

  6. The Decreto Ministeriale (abbreviated in D.M.) is an administrative decision that is adopted by a minister to define rules and practices for the ministry and/or the organisations controlled/supervised by the ministry.

  7. Italy was a kingdom between 1861 and 1946, and several laws remained effective after changing into a republic.

  8. More precisely, the 2001 Reform was included in the so-called "decreto dei 100 giorni", a decree including the most urgent issues prepared for the newly elected centre-right government (to be faced/solved within the first 100 days of activity). These were motivated by liberalisation, flexibility, and self-achievement principles, stated to be central in the agenda of the newly elected government. The myth of entrepreneurship was therefore opposed to the rhetoric of the State intervention into the economy, traditionally praised by politicians in the centre-left wing of the parliament. Interestingly, the largest Italian industrial association, notwithstanding its support to the new government, strongly argued against the 2001 reform, which was expected to raise transaction costs because firms would have to negotiate IPRs with each individual inventor, rather than only with a designated university representative.

  9. The legislative function in Italy is usually a prerogative of the Parliament. Sometimes the Parliament can delegate the ability to exercise legislative functions to the Government for a given period of time, if the matter is thought to be particularly difficult and relevant. In such a case, the resulting norm is called Decreto Legislativo (abbreviated in D.Lgs.) instead of Legge (Law).

  10. Overall, the IP legislation in Italy has been extremely uncertain in the last 15 years. As an example, a proposal to abolish the 2001 Law was approved by the Senate as early as 29th January 2002, and it was still pending in the chamber of deputy in September 2002. More recently, the draft for the first amendment to the new IP code (D.Lgs. n. 131/2010) originally meant to totally abolish the professor’s privilege (where it was still in place) and revert it to a right of first refusal for the inventors. This new rule, however, disappeared from the version of the law that was finally approved on 13th August 2010.

  11. The NetVal network (www.netval.it) has been an important source of information. The network was promoted by the Polytechnic of Milan in November 2002, and was initially joined by 29 Italian universities to address the difficulties in developing a valorisation strategy tailored to the characteristics of each institution, the scant resources to be devoted to IP-related activities, the scarcity of trained personnel, the absence of places to socialise personal experiences, and the difficulties in making money from IP.

  12. Similarity was independently assessed by two coders. In the very few cases of discrepancies, the intervention of a third coder solved the case until a unanimous decision was made.

  13. It is not unusual that most of the academic IP-related activities are undertaken and endorsed by a handful of highly motivated employees (Rasmussen et al. 2006).

  14. A patent policy fully complies with the 2001 Law if IPRs on all patentable inventions (stemming from research that was carried out as part of an employee’s duty, and that used university facilities and/or financial resources) are granted to the employees, if not otherwise stated by norms or contracts. The definition of ‘employees’ does not include students, PhDs, post-docs, and other non-tenured positions (the reader should remember that both teaching and non-teaching positions are usually tenured in Italy). This provision, which was also approved by the academic management board, was made effective by a strong tradition of esprit-de-corps, which characterised the faculty of Polytechnic of Milan (we thank one of the reviewers for providing us with additional background information).

  15. According to the Italian Constitution, all persons are equal. Therefore, if inventions made by public employees are treated differently from those made by private ones, there is potential discrimination, and the provision should be declared by judges as ineffective.

  16. Edelman (1990) showed that a new law can exert changes independently of formal legal sanctions if it provides the public with new expectations or new bases for criticising organisations, or when the law enjoys considerable societal support. However, the public at large and the students in Italy are mostly unaware of the issues presented in this paper, and are mainly interested in the reforms of the primary and secondary education systems. Budget and teacher cuts are routinely lamented at the beginning of the school year each September.

  17. The technical patent commission is entitled to market the patent, to search for potentially interested organisations, and select among them the candidate likely to obtain the best economic results. Three years from the filing date, the commission evaluates the results of the economic exploitation of the invention, and decides if it should continue or payments of the renewal fee should be suspended (please note that in the Italian patent system, the renewal fee for the first three years are due on the filing date).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Nicola Baldini, Riccardo Fini, Rosa Grimaldi & Maurizio Sobrero

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  1. Nicola Baldini
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  2. Riccardo Fini
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Correspondence to Riccardo Fini.

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Baldini, N., Fini, R., Grimaldi, R. et al. Organisational Change and the Institutionalisation of University Patenting Activity in Italy. Minerva 52, 27–53 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-013-9243-9

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