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Abstract
In this research. we are interested in university-industry technology transfer. We aim to assess the impact of marketing skills and negotiation skills of technology transfer office (TTO) on the success of universities' licensing, patenting and research based companies. The survey questionnaire was responded to by 143 participants of engineers that are members of laboratories and research units within Tunisian engineering schools. The empirical results indicate that there is a positive impact of TTO skills on university-industry technology transfer.
Keywords: University-Industry. Technology Transfer Office. Marketing Skills. Negotiation Skills
Introduction
Siegel and al. (2003) define technology transfer offices (TTO) as an emerged organizational entity which aims to "facilitate commercial knowledge transfers from universities to practitioners or university-industry technology transfer (UITT)". According to Siegel and al. (2003), the most important motives of TTO are the protection of university's intellectual property. the smooth diffusion of technology as well as the ambition to secure additional research funding. Moreover. "creating a specialized technology transfer office within a university can be instrumental in developing relations with an industry" (Macho-Stadler and al, 2007). Likewise, Powers and McDougall (2005) consider TTO as an important intermediary between university and industry. They state that "Given that faculty typically know relatively little about the business of technology commercialization but usually have a high degree of psychological ownership for their inventions, TTO professionals are key players in the commercialization of a technology". Thus, TTOs reconcile higher education and industry cultures (Powers and McDougall, 2005). Debackere and Veugelers (2005) state that "creating a specialized and decentralized technology transfer office within the university is instrumental to secure a sufficient level of autonomy for developing relations with industry".
Charles (2006) adds that technology officers have to be skilled at "boundary spanning" since they play the role of "gate keeping" and bridge the gap between firms and scientists. This skill is also emphasized by Youtie and Shapira (2008) who consider the TTO as "a boundary-spanning organization between the research and entrepreneurial and industrial communities". Moreover, Debackere and Veugelers (2005) mention other roles of TTO. For instance, they note that "the management of intellectual property and business development, reduces the asymmetric information problem in the scientific knowledge market and contributes to prevent conflicts of interest between the commercialization and the research...