Measuring the Impact of University Technology Transfer

Abstract

This paper discusses measures that capture the impact of university technology transfer activities on a university's local and regional economies (economic impact). Such assessments are of increasing interest to policy makers, researchers and technology transfer professionals, yet there have been few published discussions of the merits of various measures. The bottom line is that no single measure can capture the many aspects of technology transfer; rather, any assessment of the impact of technology transfer on local and regional economies must be discussed with regard to several measures. The authors offer two constructs for assessing the impact of university technology transfer on local and regional economies: direct versus indirect impacts and benchmarking analysis against a proper counterfactual. They also discuss, as an example, a project at the University of California that aims to develop an information infrastructure which can be used in the future to provide data to support the types of assessments discussed in the paper.