Universities strive and are also requested to contribute to public knowledge both within and across local borders. Studies on the geography of knowledge flows have identified a localisation effect; however, studies for Europe do not use the region as the unit of observation and hence do not explore regional patterns. We hypothesise that the localisation of university knowledge flows is directly related to share of firm expenditure on research and development. To test so, we use references to universities in patent documents based on a dataset for 94 EU27 regions in the period 1997-2007. We build indicators for the university knowledge flows both inside and outside the applicant region, which we explain as a function of some proxies for regional research structure based on econometric estimations. We draw some conclusions which may be of practical value to understand the regional role of the private R&D expenditure in fostering local university knowledge flows.