Abstract

This paper describes the construction of a microlevel database on knowledge creation by Higher Education Institutions (KC-HEI), accompanying the Global Knowledge Input-Output Table (KIO, Davies et al., 2023) created as part of the Rethink GCS project. KC-HEI links PATSTAT information on four decades (1980-2019) of patenting activity of 866 universities (HEIs) from 31 European countries with citation records and patent quality indicators from OECD/STI Micro-data. KC-HEI enables the analysis of HEIs’ innovation performance across 128 internationally comparable technological sectors and, separately, with respect to Artificial Intelligence (AI) inventions. We also develop a unique crosswalk between PATSTAT and ETER that combines KC-HEI with other institution-level datasets (such as ETER or RISIS) and allows us to build a parallel dataset containing 785 patenting and 2101 non-patenting universities in Europe (2011-2019). We illustrate the potential of KC-HEI, providing key stylised facts on the role of universities in knowledge creation, document extreme core-periphery patterns of university patenting in Europe and detect key university-level factors that reinforce it.