Measuring the Performance of University Technology Transfer through the estimation of Invention Disclosure Life: Focus on Urban Marginal Area

Abstract

With the growing competition in a globalized world, universities are seen as the key organizations and supporters in the national innovation system (Audretsch et al. 2006). Thus, national and regional policy makers try to set incentives for innovations and to increase the innovative potential of universities and to use it effectively. A large and diverse literature analyzes the importance of universities within the regional and national innovation system (Mowery and Sampat 2005; Cosh and Hughes 2010; Audretsch et al. 2011), often highlighting the necessity of separate and specialized organizational units to manage industry–university collaborations (Link et al. 2008; Fritsch and Lukas 2001). Within this process, TTO are seen as the institutionalized way to transport and canalize the ideas, inventions and innovations of academic researchers into the (regional) industry and society (van Ledebur 2008; Meoli et al. 2011; Gonzales-Pernia et al. 2011). Thus, given the importance attached to TTO within this process, policy makers and university management should be interested in the performance differences of TTO. During its activity, after a certain period, we can define as the “performance life”, continuing to try to transfer to the industry the same technologies leads to heavy financial loss to the TTO, because innovations and their commercialization, based on networking effects between the academic researchers and the industry, with TTO as the hub of the university–industry, determine market saturation. In this article, we deal with estimation of “performance life” for the invention disclosures by TTO and determination of replacement plan. This “performance life” has been modeled using a piecewise linear-quadratic TTFR function. A computational procedure is proposed for estimation of performance life. Hulsbeck et al., (2011) used the number of invention disclosures as a performance measure, to analyze how variance in performance can be explained by different organizational structures and variables of TTO. In this paper we refer to the same performance measure to be monitored. The approach of the present study declines the exposed issue to the specific case of marginal urban area. Results of an empirical analysis are proposed. It regards to a real case, based on the analysis of the impacts of the recent settlement of a research center, the center Cesma of the University of Naples Federico II, in marginal east area of the city of Naples, in which the local administration has decided to implement requalification actions. Finally, a technology transfer replacement plan for TTO is derived. This proposed model and solution may be appealing to geographers, managers and technology transfer agents since the graphs and tables proposed could be reproduced in a number of standard optimization software.