This chapter provides an overview of the different channels of science-industry knowledge transfer, distinguishing the formal ones from the informal. It then presents the methods and data sources that have been used to measure the contributions of public research to innovation, summarising the channels of interaction captured by each approach and outlining the respective advantages and drawbacks of each. The final section discusses the main challenges that arise in assessing the impacts of public research policies on innovation.

This chapter explores the direct contribution of public research to technical inventions, based on a newly compiled database covering 36 countries over the period 1992-2013 that matches data on public research institutions and patent applications to the European Patent Office. Based on this data, it looks at technology trends in university patenting; trends in university-industry research collaboration (based on joint patenting activity); differences in the characteristics of public research patents and private patents; and the impact of public research institutions on local innovation (i.e. the importance of geographic proximity). The last section explores the characteristics of academic start-ups based on data from Crunchbase for OECD and BRICS countries for the period 2001-16. It presents trends observed with three types of academic start-ups: companies with a student founder, a PhD founder, and a founder with research experience.

This chapter explores a new approach to assessing knowledge transfer using labour force survey data, and applies it to assess the contributions of graduates in social sciences to different industries. It first briefly describes the challenges in assessing social scientists’ contribution to knowledge transfer and industry innovation. It then provides evidence on how graduates in social sciences contribute to different economic sectors compared to those in other disciplines, building on existing evidence based on patent data and case studies, and then exploiting new evidence from labour force surveys. The chapter discusses the advantages of using this approach for capturing the flow of human capital from university to industry, and outlines the caveats.