Study urges new look at European tech transfer

The common wisdom among technology-policy analysts is that Europe is bad at transferring technology out of its great universities and into the commercial world. A new study asserts that assumption may need re-examination – and by some measures, Europe may actually outperform the U.S., Canada and Australia.

The study, at an academic technology-policy centre in Maastricht, the Netherlands, found that while the total value of the U.S. tech-commercialization effort is greater, the efficiency of European efforts may be higher. Put another way: By some measures, European universities may be getting more results per dollar of research money spent than their wealthier U.S. counterparts.

For instance, the study says, European public research institutions appear to produce 20 per cent more licenses and 40 per cent more spin-out companies per unit of R&D spent, than do American institutions. They produce 10 per cent lower licence revenues, however.  And UK institutions produce 80 per cent more licenses per unit of R&D spent, and 2.4 times as many spin-outs, as American counterparts. But again, their license revenue is lower – just 30 per cent of the U.S. average.

 The results, the authors say, suggest “that we need to take a much more critical look at European assumptions about the causes of the ‘policy paradox’ - the oft-discussed puzzle about why Europe produces such great science but so little money from it. “Europe performs better than the United States on two of the three knowledge transfer indicators” the authors studied.

The whole issue – what economic benefit comes from public research funding – has climbed sharply on government agendas around the world of late. The study, by Anthony Arundel and Catalina Bordoy, appears to offer Europe a more-upbeat counterpoint to prior gloomy research in the field – including an influential report ranking university tech-transfer efforts by the California-based Milken Foundation. The authors, however, emphasize that their findings can be only tentative as there’s a fundamental problem in comparing data from one country to another – and in fact, their primary conclusion is that these data discrepancies need fixing.

Moreover, their results -  that Europe produces more licenses and spin-outs, but lower revenue - could actually be taken as further evidence of the problem: Much activity, but not much profit. In Britain for the last few years, for instance, there has been growing criticism that the country’s professors are spending too much time starting little spin-out companies – and those companies fail at an alarming rate for lack of financing and support.

The study was done at the Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Centre on Innovation and Technology, at the United Nations University. It is a conference paper, for presentation at a tech policy conference in Ottawa that opened Sept. 25.