University-Firm Technology Transfer, a Literature Review

Since the Bayh-Dole Act was enacted by the United States in the 80's, several countries in Latin American have developed national policies on technology transfer for the university context. For instance, this is the case of Mexico with the latest science and technology law enacted in 2002 and Brazil with the innovation law enacted in 2004, among others. In these laws are stated that the universities must organize technology transfer offices to manage intellectual property and the corresponding relationship with the enterprises. More recently, in Peru was enacted the new university law in 2015. This law includes orientations for the universities about the internal organization of technology transfer and intellectual property. In this context, the purpose of this study is the literature review about the identification and characterization of the different elements of the technology transfer processes between the university and enterprise. Also, the study aims to learn how the government of different countries is helping to foster the relationship between the university and enterprise through the technology transfer offices. For this has conducted a systematic review of five databases (EBSCO, Emerald, ProQuest, IEEE and Science Direct) and a repository of conferences of the Latin American Association of Technology Management (ALTEC). Firstly, in this search it was selected the papers with the technology transfer words in the title. The period of the searching was from the year 1980 to 2015 and the result was a total of 320 scientific papers in journals and 30 conference papers. Then, it was made an initial filtering with the keywords political, negotiation, barrier, international, strategy and model. Also it was made a second filtering with the keywords University, industry and government. The analysis of the gathered information in this study shows the evolution along the time of the several elements related with the technology transfer process in the university context. Thus, it is stated that there are a growing importance of the technology transfer offices and the university spin-offs. Finally, the literature review is important for outline a framework of policies for the context of Peruvian universities about the organization of the technology transfer.