“…We focus on Italian academic inventors from the Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Networks and Systems database (see Lissoni, .and Tarasconi 2006), from the four disciplinary fields with the highest share of academic inventors over the total number of professors in the field; namely chemical engineering (which includes technology of materials, such as macromolecular compounds), biology, pharmacology, and electronics and telecommunications, for a total of 308 academic inventors and 552 patents (see also Breschi, Lissoni, and Montobbio 2005, 2007). PPPs were then obtained by matching publication data from the ISI Science Citation Index for such academic inventors to their patents, on the basis of a comparison of the titles and abstracts of patents and publications through a variety of “coword analysis” techniques (Leopold, May, and Paaß 2004; Bassecoulard and Zitt 2004). Time restrictions were also applied, so that no publication was selected for the matching exercise, which appeared in a journal more than 2 years before or after the priority date of the patent.…”