A literature review of intellectual property management in technology transfer offices: From appropriation to utilization

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the intersection between intellectual property (IP) management and technology transfer offices (TTOs) in the context of universities in order to understand how TTOs manage IP. IP management is an important issue, as it both enables and restricts the utilization of research results and impacts the competitiveness of technology-based businesses. The literature review shows that previous studies of IP management in TTOs tend to adopt a simplistic view of IP management, recommending that all valuable inventions should be patented. Moreover, academic research into TTOs and actual TTO practices both appear to focus on improving efficiency and outputs measured in terms of numbers of patents, licenses and spin-offs. We call this established view the appropriation mode of TTOs and question it based on the logics of publicly funded research and modern IP management. In its place, we suggest the utilization mode of TTOs, in which TTOs manage IP from publicly funded research in order to govern innovation processes and enable utilization of research results in a broader sense. Several recommendations are provided for both researchers and practitioners

Institutional determinants of university spin-off quantity and quality: a longitudinal, multilevel, cross-country study

The creation of spin-off firms from universities is seen as an important mechanism for the commercialization of research, and hence the overall contribution from universities to technological development and economic growth. Governments and universities are seeking to develop framework conditions that are conductive to spin-off creation. The most prevalent of such initiatives are legislative changes at national level and the establishment of technology transfer offices at university level. The effectiveness of such initiatives is debated, but empirical evidence is limited. In this paper, we analyze the full population of universities in Italy, Norway, and the UK; three countries adopting differing approaches to framework conditions, to test whether national- and university-level initiatives have an influence on the number of spin-offs created and the quality of these spin-offs. Building on institutional theory and using multilevel analysis, we find that changes in the institutional framework conditions at both national and university levels are conductive to the creation of more spin-offs, but that the increase in quantity is at the expense of the quality of these firms. Hence, the effect of such top–down changes in framework conditions on the economic impact from universities seems to be more symbolic than substantive

The Role of Equity, Royalty, and Fixed Fees in Technology Licensing to University Spin-Offs

We develop a model based on asymmetric information (adverse selection) that provides a rational explanation for the persistent use of royalties alongside equity in university technology transfer. The model shows how royalties, through their value-destroying distortions, can act as a screening tool that allows a less-informed principal, such as the university's Technology Transfer Office (TTO), to elicit private information from the more informed spin-off. We also show that equity-royalty contracts outperform fixed-fee-royalty contracts because they cause fewer value-destroying distortions. Furthermore, we show that our main result is robust to problems of moral hazard. Beside the coexistence result, the model also offers explanations for the empirical findings that equity generates higher returns than royalty and that TTOs willing to take equity in lieu of fixed fees are more successful in creating spin-offs