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A major study of entrepreneurship among US academics suggests that the majority of spin-off businesses are not based on patentable knowledge.

According to the survey of more than 11,500 academics carried out by researchers at Case Western Reserve 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ in the US and the Free 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, of the 1,948 respondents who had started a business, only 682 exploited patents obtained through formal university intellectual property systems.

Nature magazine reported that the remaining 1,266 respondents who had started businesses had based them on non-patentable material.

The study adds that university technology-transfer offices in the US are "failing to help" a significant proportion of academic entrepreneurs.