The innovative strength of a society depends on the level of academic freedom the scholars of its institutions benefit from. An international team of researchers from Germany, Italy, the US and University of Luxembourg has now proven this relationship for the first time: they establish that academic freedom positively affects the number of patent applications and the number of forward citations.
The researchers analysed patent applications and patent citations in a sample from around 160 countries over the 1900-2015 period in relation to indicators used in the Academic Freedom Index. ...
