The university’s role in reaping the benefits from research by transforming knowledge and technology into commercially usable forms is becoming increasingly important. In this article, we seek to deepen the understanding of the technology transfer office (TTO). TTOs are primarily responsible for the protection of university created intellectual property (IP) and the management of the commercialization process. The aim of this study is to determine which internal efficiency factors are statistically significant for the efficiency of TTOs, and which barriers cited in literature are experienced by TTOs, and to, furthermore, compare these between developed and developing economies. To achieve this objective, we created a survey that was sent to 103 TTO’s distributed in 21 countries. Our results demonstrate that it is apparent that developed economies (EU and UK) have overcome certain barriers experienced by developing economies (BRA, ISA and SA). Additionally, this paper has shown that TTOs have a built-in conflict with researchers. The results also emphasize the important role of networking and industry links.

通过将知识和技术转化为商业可用的形式，大学在从研究中获益方面的作用变得越来越重要。在本文中，我们力求加深对技术转让办公室 (TTO) 的了解。TTO 主要负责保护大学创造的知识产权 (IP) 和管理商业化过程。本研究的目的是确定哪些内部效率因素对 TTO 的效率具有统计学意义，以及 TTO 遇到了文献中引用的哪些障碍，并进一步比较发达经济体和发展中经济体之间的这些因素。为实现这一目标，我们创建了一项调查，该调查已发送至分布在 21 个国家/地区的 103 个 TTO。我们的结果表明，发达经济体（欧盟和英国）显然已经克服了发展中经济体（BRA、ISA 和 SA）遇到的某些障碍。此外，本文表明 TTO 与研究人员存在内在的冲突。结果还强调了网络和行业联系的重要作用。