Abstract

It is more than twenty years that university research has gone out of the traditional "ivory tower": research collaboration with industry and intellectual property rights on the results of research have become consistent and growing phenomena. A large debate resulted on the possible trade-off between the increased benefits for the direct transfer of knowledge from university to industry and the risks of reduction of quality and diffusion of university knowledge. The theoretical principles of alternative paradigms of public research should be taken into account and more empirical studies on the problem should be conducted and implemented in order to avoid that the debate becomes merely ideological. This paper makes a synthetic review of the more relevant fields of empirical research on these topics and signals some directions of theoretical research which are particularly interesting for the future.