The impact of the regional environment on the knowledge transfer outcomes of public research organisations: preliminary results for Europe

We use survey data for 238 European universities and 24 research institutes to examine the effects of regional factors at the NUTS-1 or NUTS-2 level on three knowledge transfer outcomes of public research organisations: the number of licence agreements, start-ups and R&D agreements with companies. We find that (1) a larger share of regional employment in high and medium-high technology manufacturing sectors in the same region as the public research organisation has a positive impact on the number of licence agreements. (2) A larger share of employment in knowledge-intensive services has a positive impact on the number of start-ups and research agreements, but a negative impact on licence agreements. (3) Competition as measured by the number of public research organisations in a region has a negative impact on all three outcomes.

This paper draws on 2012-2013 survey data from ASTP-PROTON and from a Knowledge Transfer survey conducted for the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, Kommersialiserring av offentlig finansiert forskning - datainnsamling, systematisering og analyse for Forskningsbarometeret, under sub-contract for DAMVAD. Their support is gratefully acknowledged.

Keywords: University-industry technology transfer, technology transfer offices, regional location

JEL Classification: I23, O32, M13, L24