According to a study released by the European Patent Organization (OEP), the University of Porto (207), the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (155), the University of Lisbon (148), the University of Minho (131) and the Instituto Superior Técnico (115) were the five Portuguese academic institutions with more patent applications registered with the OEP.

In total, 39 Portuguese academic institutions filed at least one patent application between 2000 and 2020.

In Portugal, university invention patents represented 34.2% of all patent applications submitted by Portuguese applicants to the OEP in the period 2000-2020.

The study is based on data from more than 1,200 European universities that submitted patent applications to the OEP in that period, with Germany (24.09%), France (17.97%), the United Kingdom (12.26%), and Italy (6.61%), in the first places, concentrating more than half of academic patent applications.

Portugal accounted for 0.76% of academic patent applications between 2000 and 2020.

In 2019, more than 10% of European patent applications originated from universities.

The areas of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology lead the academic patent applications submitted.

According to the same study, 16 Portuguese 'startups' (companies in the development phase) registered 43 applications for European patents on academic inventions between 2015 and 2019.