Knowledge and Technology Transfer Support Potential of Intermediate Organizations

This chapter aims at analyzing and optimizing the requirements of the internal environment regarding university-business cooperation (UBC). It focuses on university Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), intermediate organizations embedded within the university environment. They support knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) activities, particularly the commercialization of research-based products. TTOs are supposed to accelerate and facilitate KTT from science into business practice. Although literature on university research commercialization highlights the relevance of transfer support by TTOs, empirical studies and KTT practice show that TTO services are used rather sparsely. Based on theoretical considerations and results of recent empirical studies on KTT, this chapter discusses two practice cases to derive indicators for a better exploitation of unused KTT support potential of TTOs. The results show that personal engagement aimed at a marketing service provider philosophy emerges as the key factor for fostering and intensifying cooperation between researchers and TTOs.