Commercializing technology from university-industry collaborations: A configurational perspective on organizational factors

Abstract

Organizational factors have always influenced how universities commercialize their technologies. This commercialization process, once viewed as a linear one, is now understood as being the result of more intricate university-industry collaborative activities. In addressing this issue, universities increasingly face new challenges at the organizational level, such as lack of funding and competencies to manage this process. Many have started to adopt instruments that bridge financial and managerial gaps to better interact with industry. In identifying organizational factors that recently have emerged (i.e., gap-bridging instruments), this study investigates how they relate with other organizational factors in facilitating technology commercialization from university-industry interactions. Through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 47 Italian universities, we specifically examine how relationships among organizational factors foster the emergence of licensing contracts from university-industry interactions. This study contributes to the technology transfer literature by unveiling the role of gap-bridging instruments when combined with other organizational factors, as well as how their effectiveness varies based on universities’ size and their technology transfer offices’ capacity.