ENTREPRENEURIAL UNIVERSITY, TRANSFER TECHNOLOGY AND FUNDING: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Universities are now responsible for economic and social development. This new mission is transforming the traditional university into an entrepreneurial university. This entrepreneurial activity has mainly been carried out by transferring technology to industry, in particular, by patenting.The objective of this paper is to understand why some Spanish universities are more successful than others at patenting. In order to determine the factors that influence the patenting activity, we used a sample made up of 47 Spanish Public On-Campus Universities existing in 2003. Firstly, we applied the Poisson model. Secondly, after finding overdispersion in the data, the two approximations of the binomial negative were estimated (NEGBIN I and NEGBIN II). Lastly, we compared the results obtained with the three regression models.The results show that university patents are significantly positively associated with research funding, university size, technology transfer experience and resources and scientific areas with a greater market orientation. On the contrary, our results support the idea that university's research quality has a negative effect on the patent outputs.This study contributes to the literature on university patenting activity. First, there are no similar empirical studies about Spanish universities. Second, our findings provide quantitative evidence of the importance of funding research and university support policies in patent production. As a consequence, we can set out several policies to improve the dissemination of scientific knowledge and technology transfer activities.