The Productivity of French Technology Transfer Offices After Government Reforms

Abstract

This paper assesses the performance in technology transfer operated by the French university system adopting a Malmquist approach within an inferential setting. It investigates an original and unique database of French TTOs over their first development time. We find an overall weak increase in productivity, driven by technology and organisational improvement related to a small number of TTOs. More specifically, most TTOs show a stable innovative behaviour (i.e. no significant technical change) and only half of the system experiences a decline in efficiency change suggesting the lack of one best business model able to fit the entire system. Finally, we find that, on average, the presence of university-related hospital dampens TTOs' efficiency and TTO's seniority has a positive effect on productivity, enhancing simultaneously efficiency and innovation.

Keywords: Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), French University System, Malmquist Index, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Bootstrap

JEL Classification: D24. I29, O32