The KEINS database on academic inventors contains detailed information on university professors from France, Italy, and Sweden, who appear as designated inventors on one or more patent application registered at the European Patent Office (EPO), 1978-2004. Besides CESPRI, contributors to the database are: BETA (Universitè “Louis Pasteur”, Strasbourg) and IMIT-Chalmers University (Gotheborg). Umea Universitet and Università degli studi di Brescia have also contributed with data and by undertaking data-cleaning tasks. Over time, the KEINS database will be extended to other countries, and this webpage will be updated accordingly.
Produced for the EU-sponsored project on Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Networks and Systems, it is made available to all interested researchers in different versions. The version downloadable from this webpage does not report the academic inventors’ names and surnames, for privacy reasons. Researchers who may wish to access such information are kindly requested to contact me in order to clarify the use they will make of it. Other information which can be made available on request concern the academic inventors’ colleagues and the overall (non-academic) patenting activity in the academic inventors’ fields of expertise.
The KEINS database originates from the EP-INV database produced by CESPRI-Università Bocconi, which contains all EPO applications, reclassified by applicant and inventor; and from three lists of university professors of all ranks (from assistant to full professors), one for each of the above mentioned countries (PROFLISTs). Academic inventors have been identified by matching names+surnames of inventors in the EP-INV database with those in the PROFLISTs, and by checking by e-mail and phone the identity of the matches, in order to exclude homonyms.
Users of the KEINS database need to achieve some understanding of the complex methodology followed to identify inventors in the EP-INV database, and of the subsequent matching procedure; and if they wish to extend the geographical coverage of the database beyond the three original countries, they may find it useful to employ the SQL, SAS, and Access software tools that we developed over time. In order to do so, they may wish to read the following:
Lissoni F., Sanditov B., Tarasconi G. (2006), “The Keins Database on Academic Inventors: Methodology and Contents”, CESPRI working paper 181
The paper also contains the complete table of contents of the database, and ought to be cited in the reference list of all papers based on KEINS data on academic inventors, or on data collected with the KEINS methodology.
Here's three publications produced in the recent past with KEINS and KEINS-like data:
--> Lissoni F. "Academic inventors as brokers”, Research Policy 39(7), 2010, pp. 843-857 (download)
--> Lissoni F., P.Llerena, M.McKelvey, and B.Sanditov “Academic Patenting in Europe: New Evidence from the KEINS Database”, Research Evaluation 16(2), 2008, pp 87-102 (download)
--> Breschi S., F. Lissoni, F. Montobbio “The scientific productivity of academic inventors: new evidence from Italian data”, Economics of Innovation and New Technology 16/ 2, 2007, pp.101-118 (download)
For more detailed data on France, Italy, and Sweden, and for additional data on Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK, please contact me