Towards a model for determining patent revenue odds: An empirical study of technology transfer offices

Technology transfer offices (TTO) were created with the mission of executing innovation policy and its technology transfer to industry. Most studies regarding TTO focus on the context of developed countries, so there is a lack of research on the subject in emerging economies, such as Brazil. In addition, the issue of how diverse the skills of the team of a given TTO should be for their best revenue performance is still little addressed. In this sense, the present study aims to identify which characteristics of the TTO, related to their human resources, influence obtaining revenue from the patents that constitute their portfolios. To achieve this objective, 272 TTO in Brazil were analysed with the help of the Logistic Regression technique, based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation. A remarkable conclusion that emerges from our results is that the universities to increase their revenue must invest in full-time employees (e.g., rather than in scholarship students, as tends to be the norm) and foster the inventions' communications, as well as to attract and retain employees with skills directly related to knowledge fields such as Law, Engineering, and Communication (quite surprisingly, Management and Economics graduates are not included). The combination of these factors can increase the probabilities or odds of a given TTO obtaining revenue. Thus, our results contribute to TTO human resource practices, especially those in structuring stages, such as those in Brazil and Latin American countries.