Overview: The timely commercialization of research and technologies requires efficient partnership processes. Yet research transactions commonly drag on. Speed is particularly important for biomedical technologies given their historically long developmental timelines; until now, there has been no systematic analysis of factors influencing innovation-focused partnership transaction timelines. Here we assess how a host of factors affect the time it takes to execute a partnership transaction (that is, the transactional efficiency) through an analysis of US federal laboratory technology transfer partnerships. Although we find that the number of partners, the size of the partnership template document, and the size of an external partner correlate significantly with longer transaction times, neither the presence of intellectual property in the form of patents nor the presence of funding significantly affect timelines. The article concludes by offering steps that agencies and industry can take to hasten transactional efficiency.

概述：研究和技术的及时商业化需要有效的伙伴关系流程。然而，研究交易通常会拖累。考虑到生物医学技术历史悠久的发展历程，速度尤其重要。到目前为止，还没有系统地分析影响以创新为中心的合伙交易时间表的因素。在这里，我们通过对美国联邦实验室技术转让合作伙伴关系的分析来评估许多因素如何影响执行合作伙伴关系交易所需的时间（即交易效率）。尽管我们发现合作伙伴的数量，合作伙伴模板文档的大小以及外部合作伙伴的大小与更长的交易时间密切相关，专利形式的知识产权和资金的存在都不会显着影响时间表。本文最后提供了代理机构和行业可以采取的提高交易效率的步骤。