Organizational and Psychological Issues in the Commercialization of Research at Universities and Federal Labs

In the 1980s, the U.S. Congress enacted two landmark pieces of legislation designed to facilitate technology transfer from universities and federal laboratories to firms. The first law was the Bayh-Dole Act, which applied mainly to research universities. The second was the Stevenson-Wydler Act, which applied to federal labs (e.g., Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia). Soon after enactment of this legislation, many universities and federal labs established technology transfer offices (henceforth, TTOs) to facilitate the patenting and licensing of federally-funded research. As a result, there has been a substantial increase in patenting, licensing, and startup creation at U.S. research universities (Grimaldi, Kenney, Siegel, & Wright, 2011) and federal labs (Link, Siegel, & Van Fleet, 2011). We have also seen a burgeoning academic literature on university technology transfer and academic engagement with industry (e.g., Balven, Fenters, Siegel, & Waldman, 2018). In this essay, we identify several major gaps in this literature. These gaps address important organizational issues both for academics who study technology transfer and for technology transfer practitioners, who are interested in improving technology transfer performance at universities and federal/national labs. We hope that this essay will highlight the importance of these issues and encourage both academic researchers and practitioners to devote greater attention to the “human” side of technology transfer