Research On The Technology Transfer From University To Industry:an Opportunity Cost Perspective

With the advent of the knowledge economy era, the ability to innovate is becoming more and more important. It is difficult for enterprises to cope with all of the demand of innovation, and the necessity to cooperate with universities has become prominent. The purpose of industry-university cooperation is to utilize the advantage of enterprises and university and therefore improve the innovative performance of both sides.The main purpose of university-industry cooperation is industrialization of the university’s technology resources. On this purpose, university needs to transfer its technology resources to the industrial counterpart. This paper builds a game model that involves university, enterprise and government, which reveals that the overall correlation between the level of technology transfer and the knowledge stickiness of the technology is negative. Particularly, if the knowledge stickiness of the transferred technology is of middle level, the optimal choice of University is to fix its level of knowledge transfer at a specific value. Further, with a positive university’s reserve utility, those technologies of high knowledge stickiness would be unable to be transferred; if the reserve utility goes higher, more technology of relatively high knowledge stickiness cannot be transferred; when the reservation utility is overly high even technologies with relatively low knowledge stickiness may not be transferred, resulting in the waste of technical resources; on the other hand, the greater potential market gain or the smaller the marginal cost for government to incent technical transfer, the more possible technology transfer could occur. With the above conclusions, we analyze the factors that may have influence on the technology transfer from university to industry. Besides, we proposed measures aimed at improving the performance of industry-university technology transfer.