The socioeconomic development requires technical and scientific development and consequently, innovations. As innovations only happen within companies, they need to reinvent themselves from time to time to stay on the market. However, this process of novelty seeking is increasingly complex and firms end up choosing to interact with an external source of knowledge, including universities. Universities are the main generators of scientific and technical knowledge, which have a significant role in generating new technologies. Universities transfer their technologies in several ways, one of them is licensing protected technologies. However, the technological protection is not clearly embedded in universities’ mission of creating and disseminating knowledge, but it is justified as the intellectual property system is based on the incentive to invent and disclose inventions. In addition, the licensing can bring gains to the university in form of royalties that serve to fund further research. Nevertheless, the amount of licensing does not grow in the same proportion that the number of protected technologies by universities increases. A small percentage of the universities’ technologies hits the market and has the chance to become innovation. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the main factors that favor the process of transferring university technology to society through the protection and licensing process. From an exploratory study with documented analysis on protected technologies of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS, we sought to analyze among all the technologies that are developed by universities which are more susceptible to an order of protection, which had their protection granted and which have been licensed by companies. The main conclusions were that there are several factors that make the technologies not to be licensed, including lack of interaction with companies in the development of research, lack of market knowledge by teachers, limitations of Technological Innovation Center action, and others. However, the main factor is that there is a gap between the research done by the University and the interests of companies; the creation of mechanisms to facilitate companies to reach the university level is required.
Author: Pojo, Sabrina da Rosa
Advisor: Zawislak, Paulo Antonio
Level: Master’s Degree
Published Study: http://hdl.handle.net/10183/98316