Property Rights of Scientific Knowledge in Terms of Creating Innovation

Scientific knowledge has nowadays became one of the most important factors which foster innovation-based development of economies. The key role here play universities and higher education institutions which – under market pressure – also change their attitude to the knowledge creation. Originally focused on their educational duties, nowadays universities have became the real research leaders – ready to answer the market needs. The growing importance of new knowledge application to the industry, the tightening university-industry links, the impact of industry funding on knowledge production within universities or even the emer-gence of industrial knowledge, show how important private funding becomes at present. On the other hand the dominant portion of universities research activity is covered by public funds which, from another point of view, is important for the future prospects of modern economies. The aim of the article is to show the de-pendence of private and public funding of academic innovations. Methods used are: critical analysis of the literature, analysis of the statistical data.