The European Research Council (ERC) has now published a new report called Assessing the Influence of ERC-funded Research on Patented Inventions, which identified that more than 40% of ERC-funded projects generate research that is subsequently cited in patent applications.
ERC-funded projects generate considerable influence upon patentable technologies. ERC projects in the life sciences were the most likely to have linked patents, with 61% cited in patent applications, followed by projects in the physical and engineering domain with 46%. Only 7% of cited patents were linked to projects from the social sciences and humanities domain, due to the technical nature of the knowledge in patents.
ERC-linked patents were found to be concentrated in the following six different technology fields:
- Biotechnology
- Pharmaceuticals
- Computer technology
- Organic fine chemistry
- Measurement
- Semiconductors
This report was based on 6,671 ERC-funded projects across all the research domains between 2007 and 2014. It identified 172,683 scientific publications linked to these projects, and 34,513 patent applications citing those publications in their non-patent literature. The report was commissioned by the ERC to measure and assess the impact of the ERCs funding beyond research.