A Study on organisation of Technology Transfer in Research Institutions (original) (raw)

Research Institutions (RIs) in last decades have been involved in both production of technological applications and commercialisation of research results for the sake of technology transfer. These tasks are frequently taken as overlapping by both practitioners and theory, whereas they should be ideally separated. The present paper focus on the latter, by questioning why RIs have to be involved into commercialisation of research. Drawing on the identification of coordination needs among demand and supply of technological opportunities, evidence of five extensive case studies of Technology Transfer Organisations (TTOs) belonging to RIs is analysed, with regard to the efficiency of the process of opportunity recognition. The claim for superior efficiency of RIs in technology transfer depends, in a static perspective, on an expected superior capacity of TTOs to manage existing knowledge. However, in practice, TTOs do not always exploit available sources of efficiency gains. Implications for management of knowledge and technology transfer are discussed. JEL classification: O3; L2 occurred firstly in the UK (with the 1977 Patents Act, and later with 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act), immediately followed by the US 1980 Bayh-Dole Act and analogous measures in almost all European Countries, consisted in allocating to universities the IPRs over results of publicly-funded research, thereby assigning private incentives to universities for commercial exploitation of outputs, with the attempt to enhance diffusion of potentially valuable innovation. The second type of intervention has been put in place above all in the European countries, as a bundle of regional, national and communitarian measures, and took the form of funds made available for universities to finance technology transfer infrastructures and activities, following a model of organisation largely borrowed by the experience of US system (Nelson, 2001). 4 As a result of these policy trends (which were in some cases coupled with a shortage of public funds for research), universities have assessed permanent peripheral organisations to provide in-house services of technology scouting, IPR protection, marketing of patent and licenses, spin-off creation and sometimes finance of technological development. In other words, research institutions have started to play a role not only as developers of technological applications, but also as agents of opportunity recognition and commercialisation of new technologies, thus acting as coordinators in the market of technological opportunities. These ideally separable roles -creator of new knowledge and coordinator of supply and demand of innovation -have started to be jointly performed by research institutions, which have integrated downstream to commercialise research results. As Sampat and Nelson (1999) and Mowery and Sampat (2001) describe, although the referred policies did not have the intention to rule out the way technology transfer operations had to be organised, the research-integrated model of TTOs emerged as the outcome of a path-dependent, not-intentionally-planned process of imitation and standardisation among RIs, after the described policies went into force. Therefore, given that the current -research-integrated -US and European model of TTO is neither the spontaneous organisation of activities, nor the consciously planned solution to coordination problems, there is the need to question the rational behind it, by asking whether RIs can be efficient actors of opportunity recognition. Virtually, from the point of view of a national government seeking to overcome market failures in technology transfer, there may be a set of alternative design of ownership and control that can provide coordination between demand and supply of technological goods. After all, one thing is to ask universities and publicly-funded research to be concerned on extracting social benefits from scientific research, by producing applied pieces of technology enabling better transfer of results to industry, quite another is to say that RIs have to provide marketing services for technology transfer and become coordinators in market for innovation. Now, provided that the organisational design is not neutral to final outcome of technology transfer (Nelson and Sampat, 2001), one can reasonably question the efficiency of current design, compared to alternative organisational solutions. Moreover, this is not just a problem of market efficiency and eventually Aghion P., Horwitt P, 1998, Endogenous Growth Theory, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Agrawal A., 2001, University-to-industry knowledge transfer: literature review and unanswered questions, International Journal of Management Reviews, 3(4):285-302. Bray M.