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Identifying the effects of technology transfer policy using a quantile regression: the case of South Korea

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Abstract

The South Korean government provided policy levers for technology transfer by establishing the Technology Transfer Promotion Act in 2000. It also implemented a technology transfer promotion plan based on this law. Along with the law’s enactment, the Korean government required the establishment of technology licensing offices (TLOs) for national and public universities. Although this policy led to the quantitative expansion of TLOs, it did not result in qualitative growth. The Korean government implemented a supplementary program to support the leading TLOs’ labor and business expenses. In the current work, the author questions if the program had a significant effect on the performance of TLOs. I analyze the policy effect on the performance of TLOs, as measured by royalty income or the number of technology transfer contracts. In particular, the heterogeneous effect is examined by using quantile regression applied to publicly available university panel data from 2007 to 2015. The results corroborate that the program had a significant impact only on the lower 10% quantile. The government also provides programs for marketing, consulting, and manpower training. However, the policy only focuses on financial support, and the support provided to each university is uniform. In addition, results suggest that the support policy must be diversified based on the characteristics and research capacity of each university.

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Fig. 1

Source: Siegel and Phan (2004)

Fig. 2

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Notes

  1. The 2nd-term TLO project was completed in 2015. The policy program has continued in a similar fashion with emphasis on linkages between university TLOs and private/public research institutes and businesses since 2016.

  2. The IACF is an organization established within the universities to promote industrial education and university–industry cooperation to strengthen the competitiveness of universities and contribute to the development of local communities and national competitiveness. Many IACFs in Korea have a legal basis on the Industrial Education Enhancement and Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Promotion Act.

  3. A sunset provision is a provision of a law that it will automatically be terminated after a fixed period unless it is extended by law (Collins Dictionary).

  4. A discussion about the first-step estimation of Heckman’s two-step approach is provided in “Appendix”.

  5. From 2011 to 2015, the IACFs spent an average of about 22.5 billion KRW in spending on industry-university cooperation activities.

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Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the very helpful suggestions by two referees that have greatly improved the paper. The usual caveat applies.

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  1. Department of Knowledge Economy, Korea Development Institute, Sejong, South Korea

    Jaepil Han

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  1. Jaepil Han
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Appendix: The first step of Heckman’s two-step approach

Appendix: The first step of Heckman’s two-step approach

The first step of Heckman’s two-step approach is to predict the likelihood of selection for the financial support project by using a probit model (selection mechanism model). First of all, I estimated a selection mechanism model with a set of explanatory variables that correspond to the policy target selection criteria based on Table 11. Those variables are Total research fund, TLO employment, the number of domestic/overseas patent granted, operating expenses for industry-academia cooperation, total financial support, and the number of researchers. All the explanatory variables are lagged by a period. Table 12 displays the first-step probit model estimation results. By using the estimation results, I obtain the inverse Mill’s ratio, which means the likelihood of selection. The t-statistic on the inverse Mills ratio is 12.317 and statistically significant. This implies the selection model is appropriate.

Table 12 The First-stage Probit-model estimation results
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Han, J. Identifying the effects of technology transfer policy using a quantile regression: the case of South Korea. J Technol Transf 45, 1690–1717 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-019-09768-3

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