Licensing of University Innovations: Organizational Structure and the Role of Technology Transfer Offices

This project would like to provide some theoretical models helping to explain the optimal organization structure and the specific role a Tto may have in stimulating the transfer or know-how from the science base into commercial applications and the organizational issues that may increase the efficiency of the technological transfers between University and Industry. Fisrt, we would like to propose a reputation argument in the advantage of Ttos. Using an asymmetric information framework, where firms have incomplete information on the quality of inventions, we think that we can develop a reputation argument where the Tto helps to reduce the asymmetric information problem. The idea is to indicate the conditions for which a Tto, being able to pool inventions across researchers, will have an incentive to build a reputation for selling quality projects. The type of questions we would like to address is: whether the Tto is more efficient in selling innovations that the university laboratories and in which aspect; whether the income raised by the Tto is larger than the income raised by university labs; which are the characteristics of the universities that favor the efficiency of the TTO. Second, we propose to analyze the incentive schemes and the sharing of the technology tranfer income within the University agents. These incentives will have a great impact on the success of the research stage as well as on the disclosure and licensing stage. What is the better way of sharing the licensing income among Faculty Tto and the University Administration?