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What drives the university use of technology transfer offices? Evidence from Italy

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Abstract

Over the last 20 years, universities have made steady progress in their efforts to foster the process of technology transfer through collaboration with industry. The establishment of technology transfer offices (TTO) has become routine for supporting the commercialization of academic research. However, the literature shows that there are many factors that affect the efficiency and effectiveness of these offices. Based on original data from interviews with 197 university departments in Italy, this paper investigates the determinants of universities university use of TTOs. We take account of the effects of universities’ and TTOs characteristics, of research and geographic indicators.

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Notes

  1. See Landry et al. (2007) for an overview.

  2. See, e.g., the results of the UK HE-BCI survey or Muscio (2008).

  3. For, e.g., the two national laws D.L. 27/7/1999 no. 297 and D.M. 8/8/2000 no. 593 encourage and regulate the creation of university TTOs. Art. 65 of the Codice dei Diritti di Proprietà Industriale, 10/02/2005, introduced Bayh-Dole act-like regulation of intellectual property, granting intellectual property rights to scientists for their scientific discoveries. You took out qualification of the acro IPR in the text so either it must be reinstated or you must establish it in the footnote so that you continue to use the short form in the fn or spell out in footnotes as well, which would be more consistent.

  4. The survey was carried out by Gruppo di Ricerche Industriali e Finanziarie (GRIF)—Università Luiss Guido Carli (Roma) as part of the research project “The Governance of Technology Transfer in Italy”, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR), Progetto FIRB: “A Multidimensional Approach to Technology Transfer”.

  5. The National University Council (CUN) classification of scientific areas is similar to that applied by the OECD in its Frascati Manual (OECD 2002). The scientific areas considered here correspond to the areas identified by the Frascati Manual as: (1) Natural Sciences, (2) Engineering & Technology, (3) Medical Sciences, (4) Agricultural Sciences.

  6. The list of departments is available at: www.cineca.it. Contact details were found for 1,047 out of 1,116 department directors.

  7. This is supported by the results of the econometric analysis: estimates were similar with and without population weighting.

  8. Apart from Industrial Engineering, where there is around one collaboration per research staff member.

  9. In 2005 CIVR conducted the Valutazione Triennale della Ricerca (VTR), the first national evaluation of research activity in Italy, covering 2001–2003 (MIUR 2007). The review targeted the research performance of all universities and public research centres. The 102 research institutions involved in the review submitted a predefined number of research outputs (books, book chapters, journal articles, patents and other types of economic valorization of research results, manufactured and artistic products) to an expert panel for peer review. The number of research outputs per institution was defined based on university size (full-time-equivalent research staff). The VTR rated and ranked university research performance and assessed the impact factor of outputs.

  10. Provinces correspond to NUTS 3 units in the Eurostat classification of administrative units in Europe. The average dimension of an Italian province is 2,926.6 km2. The data refer to the 2001 Census carried out by ISTAT.

  11. Chapple et al. (2005) suggest that in these geographical contexts, government should establish regional TTOs to offer additional assistance to both universities and businesses.

  12. Jensen and Thursby (2001) in their study on university licensing found that the majority of licensed technologies are not ready for commercialization and require significant development to turn them into commercial products.

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Acknowledgments

This work benefited from valuable comments from Francesco Crespi, Jean-Michel Dalle, Francesco Ferrante, Aldo Geuna, Georg Licht, Francesco Lissoni, Mauro Mallone, Laura Ramaciotti and two anonymous referees. The author would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Italian Ministry of University and Research (FIRB Project 2003—Prot. RBNE033K2R: “A multidimensional approach to technology transfer for more efficient organizational models”). Finally the author is grateful to the late Professor Fabio Gobbo for his guidance and encouragement throughout this work.

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  1. Dipartimento Di Scienze Economiche, Matematiche E Statistiche, Università degli Studi di Foggia, Largo Papa Giovanni Paolo II, 1, 71100, Foggia, Italy

    Alessandro Muscio

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Muscio, A. What drives the university use of technology transfer offices? Evidence from Italy. J Technol Transf 35, 181–202 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-009-9121-7

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