Authors : Aqilah Manap, Norain Ismail and Safiah Sidek
Abstract: Innovation is main agenda in trailing vision 2020. Yet, it left 5 years more to achieve the target while various steps have been taken by the Malaysia government. The role of universities in developing the national innovation and growing the economy is well recognized but the transforming of research outputs into marketplace has not been as good. Recognizing commercialisation of research output can generate university income, in the creation of new business and jobs. Transferring the research output for commercialisation involved many stakeholders such as academic researcher, Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) and industry. Among these players, TTOs are commonly considered to be key stakeholders to determine a university’s overall success at technology transfer process. Thus, universities start to establish their TTOs to encourage the commercialisation activities. Establishment of a TTO within the university is often viewed as tool for helping the researcher to turn their research output into Intellectual Property (IP) commercialisation and developing relations with industry and other interested parties. In this study, we focus on the issues and challenges of TTO in assisting the university IP commercialisation. It was found that issues and challenges arise from the aspects of insufficient resources devoted to TTOs, bureaucracy and inflexibility of university administrator, poor link with the industry, the size of TTOs itself, IP policy and the motivation of the researcher of working together with TTO.
Aqilah Manap, Norain Ismail and Safiah Sidek, 2017. The Roles of Technology Transfer Offices to Facilitate Intellectual Property Commercialisation in the University: Issues and Challenges. The Social Sciences, 12: 919-924.