Abstract:

Since 1980s in the U.S. and 2013 in Turkey, almost all the best research universities have opened technology transfer offices (TTOs) to improve Quadruple Helix Model (QHM) in which government, industry, academia and civil participants come and work together to make the innovation based changes and transformation in the world, in the region, in the country, in the organization, and even in the personal level. These TTOs play important roles in leading the experimentation and prototyping of the university environments for real world needs. Even though the roles, the structures, the values, and the concentrations of the TTOs change, their impacts and effectiveness should be critically assessed in order to accelerate exponentially their roles in the QHM.

In order to have a well-structured assessment for Turkey, seven important regions -East Coast and West of North America, Canada, the UK, the EU, Israel, and Far East- were analyzed critically. After “principles of integrated collaboration, co-created shared value, cultivated innovation ecosystems, unleashed exponential technologies, and extraordinarily rapid adoption” were taken into account, the assessment criteria were decided to maximize the effects of TTOs. Hence, the systems and their effectiveness were classified and clustered in order to be analyzed critically in NVivo.

The results had showed that there were five key elements in the QHM. The first aspect is the networking of the QHM where the stakeholders were strategically engaged. The second most important perspective was the capacity in the Research and Development (R&D), particularly those, which could achieve competitive advantages in the global and regional markets. Additionally, the capacity of the collaboration was another dimension in accelerating QHM partners in order to improve effectiveness and efficiencies in short time of period.

More importantly, the last two dimensions, which were corporate entrepreneurship capacity and proactive intellectual property management, were the ones, which distracted, changed and transformed exponentially the ecosystems. In the corporate entrepreneurship capacity of QHM, the capacity of corporate venturing, start-ups and spin-offs were very successful in the markets in which they had transformed to unicorns-1 billion US$ startups. Additionally, in the proactive intellectual property management, they preferred reverse engineering, which was innovating high technological products and services after understanding the needs of the QHM stakeholders. The licensing processes had systematically facilitated technology transfer to private companies and even individuals.

In this transformation, TTOs had played important roles where their effectiveness was also measured within the institution itself. The highly effective TTOs had changed the faculty salaries, which were much higher than the other universities. Additionally, there was the large number of staff for technology licensing. They spent most of their time in understanding the needs of the QHM stakeholders and licensing even before the patents applications and registration. Another dimension in effectiveness of the TTOs was seen in the amount of the value of private grants, contracts, and even donations. The last but not the least aspect of the TTOs in QHM is finding the large amount of innovative R&D funding from the industry, the government, and the global R&D funds, like NIH, ERC, and EU.

Keywords:

University Technology Transfer Offices, Effectiveness, Quadruple Helix Model Perspective University Leadership, Leadership Effectiveness.