Moral Licensing Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In today’s highly challenging knowledge-based economy, many universities are have been taking additional value from their technologies developed in their research laboratories by licensing their intellectual property (Tidd & Bessant, 2011). In Turkey, however, this issue is very new and most of the university administrators are not aware about the intellectual property rights (Pathak, Xavier-Oliveira, & Laplume, 2013). As Huizingh has mentioned that such technology transfer of the universities has recently become an important dimension for the university strategy, as part of a trend called open innovation. Open innovation can involve both bringing knowledge from university into the innovative corporations and also transferring technologies from within the corporation to external partners, like the universities. By licensing their technology, universities have achieve a successful return on other and more deep R&D. In that way, technology transfer by licensing technology help universities (Huizingh, 2011). However, in many universities, especially in Turkey instead of licensing technology in order to achieve additional revenues by annual royalties, have not very effective in licensing. In particular, universities transfer their competitively outstanding technologies due to the lack of strategic management. Additionally, researchers often have difficulty in licensing opportunities due to the lack of the technology licensing offices (Shane & Somaya, 2007).
In order to understand the Turkish universities in technology transfer and licensing, a well-rounded research had conducted in Istanbul, the most developed city in Turkey, in which two different universities had chosen. After analyzing the academic and managerial background on technology licensing, exploratory interviews with 45 researchers in two different faculties, which were engineering and medicine, had conducted to understand deeply the level of awareness about the technology transfer and licensing. Additionally, a simple questionnaire was given to overview the general knowledge of the researchers in licensing and intellectual property rights. In the study, a phenomenological analysis was conducted and 16 research questions were taken into consideration during the semi-structured interviews. Then the data were overviewed critically by using Atlas.ti 7 to elaborate deeply the main situation regarding to the technology transfer and licensing
The results of the depth analysis showed that most of the participants (88%) accepted that they did not know about the technology transfer and licensing. More significantly, the most of the participants from the faculties of medicine and engineering were not aware about the importance of the technology that they had developed in terms of licensing and royalties that they could earn. Those (43%) who were developing technology and transfer of the technology to the corporations felt alone and scared about licensing. Some (22%) of the young participants had mentioned about the negative attitudes of the older professors. Those, who were successful in technology transfer and licensing, on the other hand, had mentioned that they did not like to talk about licensing and they preferred to work in corporations rather than in the university in order to protect themselves from the negative attitudes of their colleagues. Most (89%) of them strongly clarified that they had potential technological solutions for specific problems, but they faced the challenges for technology transfer and licensing. The participants from the medicine had less knowledge in technology transfer and licensing than those from the engineering faculty. Some of them (32%) could not identify profitable applications of their studies. In addition, the large number of the participants (87%) had defined transferring technology as a complex process. They could not deal with the licensing activity. Hence, that mentioned that they needed technology licensing office to cope effectively and efficiently with managerial formalities.