This study looks at how STEM oriented faculty at approximately 100 colleges and universities, primarily research universities and medical schools, view their technology transfer office. Faculty evaluate the perceived skills of the tech transfer office in a myriad of areas, including but not limited to skill in communicating with faculty, commercial acumen, advice in filing technology disclosure report, patenting and licensing expertise, provision of incubation space, and many other areas.
The report presents detailed data on exactly who uses the tech transfer office and how often, with detailed data no those that have ever consulted a tech transfer officer. It also defines exactly who thinks that the tech transfer office should be better funded, or not, or better staffed, or not. Overall, the study gives its readers a highly detailed view of how faculty react to the tech transfer office, that they think it does well, not well, what they want from it in the future, and how and how much their university should support the tech transfer office.
The study is designed to enable tech transfer offices to benchmark their performance with that of their peers. Data in the report is broken out by a range of personal and institutional variables including age, gender, race/ethnicity, work title, tenure status, lifetime grant total receipts as well as university type, total enrollment and public/private status. So, for example, we asked faculty surveyed to grade the overall performance of their tech transfer office, and these grades are broken down by the innumerable variables mentioned above.
Just a few of this 78-page report’s many findings are that:
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9% of faculty in institutions with more than 40,000 students graded their tech transfer offices with a “D’ or an “F”.
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Tenured faculty gave significantly higher grades to the tech transfer office than did untenured faculty on a tenure track.
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In general, men were happier than women with the tech transfer office.
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A much higher percentage of older than younger faculty supported increased spending on the tech transfer office.