International audience Modern universities are increasingly urged to operate more entrepreneurially, leading them to try to diffuse their knowledge production more systematically, most obviously through scientific articles and patents. The authors investigate the role of universities as knowledge brokers and delimit more precisely the sphere of emergence and influence of university-derived knowledge. The main issue empirically addressed is whether the likelihood of a patenting team being geographically widespread depends on the characteristics of the inventing academic scientists' publishing network. In so doing, the authors estimate the respective influences of scientists' publishing patterns on the range of their entrepreneurial behaviours (represented by their patenting activity).