Weak Signal's description 
Policy metrics often depend on policy objectives. In the EU, there is a diversity of policy objectives regarding the role of university patents and university-industry cooperation: ‘effective knowledge sharing’, ‘strengthening research institutions’ and two of the sub-objectives lying behind ‘strengthening research institutions’ – ‘coping with diversification of funding’ and ‘encouraging performance’. Hence, policy makers are increasingly using a broad range of metrics and there has been much debate about what metrics to be included: number of university-owned patents, licensing income, contract incomes, consultancy incomes, etc. According to the results at aggregate level, the more R&D policy supports the objective of ‘coping with diversification of funding’, the more university patent ownership will increase but the more R&D policy supports the objective of ‘encouraging performance’, the less university patent ownership will increase.