The protection of the inventions across patents in european, japanese and american universities.

In the last years an increasing trend has taken place in the universities of the whole world to protecting their inventions across rights of patents. This fact reflects the major usefulness of the university investigation and the intention of transferring these results to the industry. In this work we study the patents that have applied, across the European route, the Japanese, American and European universities, in order to establish a comparative analysis among them. We analyze the level of applications that they present, the technological areas and the extension of the protection of these patents and the ranking of the universities that more patents applied and of the companies that collaborate with these universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]