Abstract:

A main challenge for building a sustainable and growing economy is the continuous improvement of products, services and work environments, which strongly depends on the ability of introducing innovations and transferring them from the point of idea generation to the point of diffusion and adoption by the acquirers (Weinberg, 2011). Although universities are the key developers of new technologies, their output is mostly directed to the scientific community and not commercially exploited. Technology transfer offices are passively involved in a way that they react to demand but they are not transfer drivers. Technology transfer processes are carried out in different forms depending on the available resources and economic structures. Conventionally, knowledge and technology transfer activities are treated as a black box and investigated as input-output relationship (Besson et al., 2012). InnoSPICE is ISO/IEC 15504 based model used to bridge the gap between the technology acquirers and developers, which is a challenging task. It is used as a tool for quality management in the field of technology transfer. The aim of this work is to test its applicability in Egypt for the first time as a case study. The main contribution of this work is to adopt this model to improve the research activities for sustainable development. A guided self-assessment technique was implemented. Based on the evaluation results, a process capability profile has been designed and the model has predicted consistently the activity of the technology developer. The results concluded that the organization still requires improvements regarding prototype and technology development practices. After the application of the model, it was found that base practices require key performance indicators to be objective.

Keywords:

Process capability, innoSPICE, innovation, developing countries.