Incentive System for Knowledge and Technology Transfer from Universities

In today's global world, universities find themselves competing for funds on a global scale and thus also need to consider the opportunity to raise funds from industry. In order to acquire new funds from industry, research must be valuable, useable, and diffused to industry for later implementation. Herein lays the key challenge for knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) from universities to industry: Scientific research has specific characteristics, which hinder the fluent flow of knowledge. Universities often focus on fundamental and basic research producing public knowledge, while corporations aim at acquiring secure, private knowledge for the development of intellectual property rights and competitive advantages. Additionally, missing networks to industry partners, high teaching burden, insufficient financial means, and diverging project scopes drive researchers away from industry related research. To countervail these issues, measures need to be taken to align interests, project scopes, expectations, increase funds and mutual respect to enhance practice-oriented, collaborative research. Incentive systems can facilitate the process of change toward an understanding of the importance of relevant industry research. This paper will therefore empirically attempt to identify the most efficient incentives for KTT activities and hence develop an incentive system for motivating researchers, such that more knowledge and technology will be diffused to industry. The most important result of this study includes the fact, that researchers seem to be motivated by extrinsic measures very well. Additionally, help finding relevant industry partners and industry research topics are very frequently requested incentives to engage more in KTT activities. This shows that researchers need assistance and guidance when it comes to industry related research.