Support to university patent ownership is a popular R&D policy initiative to promote effective knowledge sharing. Yet the broader, unintentional, consequences of such support on the link between public funding of university R&D and increased university-industry
cooperation have not been studied. Through regression models on the determinants of university-owned patents in the EU and US, tentative results illustrate that the risk of negative consequences exists. Complementing current metrics about university
performance with statistics about business patents with university inventors would help avoid such a risk and find definitive quantitative evidence.