In recent years, universities have rapidly escalated their involvement in technology transfer. Accelerated in part by external expectations for economic development as well as internal pressures to generate new sources of revenue, this emergent commer...
In recent years, universities have rapidly escalated their involvement in technology transfer. Accelerated in part by external expectations for economic development as well as internal pressures to generate new sources of revenue, this emergent commercialization mission for higher education is serving to transform higher education in substantive ways.
In many respects, recent S&T policy trends support both the idea of national innovation system(NIS) composed of multiple actors in constant interaction and the hypothesis of an emerging new system of knowledge production, characterized by greater heterogeneity in scientific research and a growing affiliation between university researchers and extra-university partners.
In this regards, I would operationally define the notion of university-industry research collaboration (UIRC) in this study to include as possible as many types of cooperative research projects, like product development supported by academia or government, cooperative research for product development, basic research supported by companies and cooperative projects in basic research. Moreover, I see to it that performances of UIRC include R&D work forces, master theses and doctoral dissertations, student interns, consultations, patents, know-hows, university start-ups, licenses and royalties.
The purpose of this study is to identify the influential factors on the performances of university-industry research collaboration, and to assess the impact of the factors on the academical, technological and commercial outputs of UIRC in the Republic of Korea. For this purpose, I present quantitative and qualitative evidences on the impact factors and output factors of UIRC.
Based on a survey of 107 universities, I conclude that critical influential factors on the academic performances of UIRC are intellectual eminences and sizes of universities, that the ages of TTO influence the technological performances of UIRC, and that the university policies like the distribution of royalty rates between inventors and the university influence commercial performances of UIRC.
This research also represents the most influential factors on 8 kinds of substantial outputs of sub-groups of universities, like national universities vs. private universities, universities located in Seoul Metropolitan Area vs. universities located in non Seoul Metropolitan Area, and research oriented universities vs. education oriented universities. For example, the royalty rates influence the licensing revenues of national research universities whereas R&D expenditures influence the licensing revenues of research universities located in non Seoul Metropolitan Area.
The results of 38 in-depth interviews of university TTO directors shows that most of them remarked license and royalty, patents and intellectual property as the significant output of university-industry technology transfer(UITT), and that the barriers to UITT procedure are lack of expertise of university TTO staffs, insufficient compensation for faculty members and inconsistent evaluation system of university technologies. TTO directors also suggest that establishment of UITT system, staffing of UITT experts and technology financing systems for university technology based start-ups are important to enhance the UITT procedures in Korea.
In short, this study suggests that the government and the universities should find ways to establish and support the university TTOs and to improve the faculty reward systems to promote the performances of UIRC and to enhance the UITT procedures in Korea.