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Assessing the productivity of technology transfer offices: an analysis of the relevance of aspiration performance and portfolio complexity

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Abstract

The paper investigates the productivity level of technology transfer offices (TTOs) affiliated to Spanish public universities. The proposed approach allows the development of a framework that matches universities’ technology transfer concerns with the need to accurately analyze the role of the outcome configuration of TTOs. We analyze the productivity of Spanish TTOs during 2006–2011 by computing total factor productivity models rooted in non-parametric techniques, namely the Malmquist index. The results confirm that technology transfer productivity is affected by changes in the configuration of the TTO’s outcome portfolio that result from benchmarking own and market peers’ performance levels. While benchmarking own performance levels facilitates the exploitation of internal resources and yields superior productivity results, changes in TTO’s portfolio based on comparisons with market peers might generate greater operational costs that negatively impact productivity.

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Notes

  1. It should be kept in mind that, during the analyzed period, reliable data on the TTO’s budget are not available from the RedOTRI annual reports for 12 universities.

  2. Although it is not the case in our data, we extend the analysis to the case of zero values in the input set. Zero input values are problematic in DEA models. From an economic point of view, zero input values indicate that the focal unit can produce outputs without consuming resources, which leads to unfeasible DEA scores (see Thanassoulis et al. 2008 for a comprehensive review on this issue).

  3. Literature on the definition and causes of technical change is extensive. In this study, technical change refers to shifts of the production function in the input–output space that originate from different combinations in the input-mix and the output-mix. In the context of non-parametric productivity models, a more in-depth analysis of technical change can be found in Kumar and Russell (2002) and Grifell-Tatjé and Lovell (2015).

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Acknowledgements

For their ideas and insightful comments that helped us to improve the paper we are grateful to Tommaso Agasisti (Politecnico di Milano School of Management) and seminar participants at the 4th Workshop on Efficiency in Education (2016). Esteban Lafuente acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Grant No. ECO2013-48496-C4-4-R).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona Tech), EPSEB, Av. Gregorio Marañón, 44-50, 3era planta, 08028, Barcelona, Spain

    Esteban Lafuente

  2. Department of Economy and Business Organization, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, C. Immaculada, 22, 08017, Barcelona, Spain

    Jasmina Berbegal-Mirabent

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  1. Esteban Lafuente
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  2. Jasmina Berbegal-Mirabent
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Correspondence to Esteban Lafuente.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6.

Table 6 Malmquist TFP results of Spanish public technology transfer offices (2007–2011)
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Lafuente, E., Berbegal-Mirabent, J. Assessing the productivity of technology transfer offices: an analysis of the relevance of aspiration performance and portfolio complexity. J Technol Transf 44, 778–801 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-017-9604-x

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