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Category Science Radar
18 October 2024

More academic freedom leads to more innovation

Tag Innovation
Tag Research

More academic freedom leads to more innovation

For the first time, study shows link

The innovative power of a society depends on the degree of academic freedom. An international team including the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now demonstrated this relationship for the first time. The researchers analyzed patent applications and patent citations in a sample of around 160 countries over the period 1900-2015 in relation to the indicators used in the Academic Freedom Index. Given the global decline in academic freedom over the past 10 years, the researchers predict a loss of innovative output.

 

In recent years, scientists in many countries have experienced a loss of academic freedom. This trend has been criticized on fundamental grounds. However, there has been no research on whether the degree of academic freedom also affects a society's ability to produce innovation.

For the first time, an international team of researchers has examined the relationship between academic freedom and innovation output. The researchers used patent applications and citations as indicators of the quantity and quality of innovations. Their analysis covered the period 1900-2015 in 157 countries. The V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) dataset from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg includes several indicators of democracy, some of which date back to 1789. These include freedom of science, which the institute has been tracking for several years in the Academic Freedom Index together with the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. The team obtained data on the number of patent applications and citations from the European Patent Office's PATSTAT database.

 

Alarming signs for many countries
The study shows that more freedom for scientists to work leads to more innovation. Improvements in academic freedom are followed by increases in the number of patent applications and, subsequently, in the number of patent citations.

However, for the first time in the last 100 years, academic freedom is expected to decline globally between 2011 and 2021. This is also true for the group of 25 countries with the strongest science base. For this decade, the research team used the results of the study to calculate the impact of the decline. "We predict a global decline in innovative capacity of 4-6%. In the leading countries, the figure is as high as 5-8%," says study author Paul Momtaz, Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at TUM.

"The results are an alarming sign for many countries. Those who limit academic freedom also limit the ability to develop new technologies and processes, thus hindering progress and prosperity," says Paul Momtaz. "We see this trend not only in dictatorships, but also increasingly in democratic states where populist parties have gained influence.

 

Numerous Robustness Checks Confirm the Results
The researchers conducted several checks to confirm the robustness of the relationship between academic freedom and innovation output. For example, they checked whether the correlation was really due to academic freedom in particular or to freedom in general in a society. They also ruled out reverse causality, i.e. the possibility that countries that allow more academic freedom have lower levels of innovation. The results of the study were also confirmed when the perspective was narrowed to countries with very high or very low numbers of patent applications, when only the post-1980 period was considered, or when the analysis was limited to specific aspects of academic freedom.

 

To the paper: Audretsch DB, Fisch C, Franzoni C, Momtaz PP, Vismara S (2024): Academic freedom and innovation. PLoS ONE 19(6): e0304560. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0304560