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Francesco Lissoni, Patrick Llerena, Maureen McKelvey and Bulat Sanditov 1. INTRODUCTION This chapter reports key statistics from the KEINS database, which shed new light on the patenting activity of universities and their staff in France, Italy, and Sweden. Created by the authors, along with Ingrid Schild of Umeå University, the KEINS database allows the first cross-country comparison of university patenting patterns in Europe. The KEINS database covers inventions produced by academic scientists in active service around 2004-05 in the three countries considered, for which a patent application has been filed at EPO. In particular, it contains both the applications submitted by universities (university-owned patents) and the applications submitted by companies, individuals or governmental and non-profit organizations, as a result of various contractual arrangements between such organizations and the scientists, their universities, and other public or private sponsors (university-invented patents). For sake of clarity, we will speak of ‘university patenting’ when referring to universityowned patents, and to ‘academic patenting’ when referring to both university-owned and university-invented patents. We will always refer to patent applications (upon which almost all of our statistics are based) either in full or, for sake of brevity, simply as patents, and refer to ‘granted patents’ explicitly, when needed. The key intuition behind the KEINS data collection effort is that, due to institutional differences, academic patents in Europe are much less likely to be owned by universities than in the USA. These institutional differences concern both the autonomy of universities, the control they…. © Maureen McKelvey and Magnus Holmén 2009.