Factors affecting the transfer of technology from industry/university cooperatives to sponsoring companies

This paper illuminates the technology-transfer process by identifying the factors affecting the implementation decisions of sponsor companies with regard to eight projects conducted at two industry/university cooperative-research centers. Telephone interviews with corporate-sponsor representatives provided the data. The factors reported most often as influential in the decision of whether or not to use research results were relevance of the project, researcher's ability to demonstrate the usefulness of the results, and the quality of communication with the researcher. When results were not used, lack of company support and lack of communication within the company also appeared to be influential. The end result of these analyses is a model depicting the factors that affect the implementation decision.