Patents from the academic sector can be highly attractive, both for inventors and their organizations. There are several examples where licence revenues of up to hundreds of millions of Euros have been generated. However, in order to harvest such revenues, many less successful applications have to be filed. This requires stringent patent management, terminating less promising applications early on in the patent life cycle, before high costs are generated. IP from the academic sector can be commercialized both by licensing and spin-off companies, and there are successful examples for both approaches. Also here a good strategy is needed, balancing the pros and cons of exclusive and non-exclusive licences and the terms of the licence contracts. With a good organization of IP management in place, net profits (based on the cost of licensing, not on the cost of research) can be generated for research organizations, amounting – in Germany – to profits in the range of 0.5% to 5% of the total budget of the organizations for which published data are available.