Today Don Zuhn at PatentDocs posted about a report from the National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association, which lists the universities worldwide that received the most U.S. utility patents in 2012. The University of California tops the list with 357 patents; last on the list is Seoul National University Industry Foundation with 18 patents. Of the top 100, most of the non-US universities are located in the Far East (27). There is only one entry for a European university (Ecole Polytechnique, Federale de Lausanne, coming at 94th place with 20 patents) and one entry for the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia with 57 patents. The tech transfer companies of the Technion, Weizmann Institute, Hebrew University and Tel-Aviv University all made the list, with 30, 35, 30 and 37 patents, respectively.
While numbers of patents per se aren’t necessarily a measure of the patentee’s successful contributions to commerce, it’s nevertheless impressive that Israel, with a population significantly smaller than those of any of the other countries represented on the list (unless one counts Hong Kong as separate from China), and which has to devote a larger proportion of its budget to defense than the other countries, has four universities on the list (out of seven Israeli universities total). And according to this slideshow, and this news article, and this publication, Hebrew U. (Yissum), Weizmann (Yeda) and Technion have licensing revenues on par with those of the leading US universities.