Australian University Technology Transfer Managers: Backgrounds, Work Roles, Specialist Skills and Perceptions

Technology transfer managers are a new group of specialist professionals engaged in facilitating transfer of university research discoveries and inventions to business firms and other research users. With relatively high academic qualifications and enjoying higher salaries than many other comparable university staff, technology transfer managers tend to have been recruited from outside the higher education sector, having had significant commercial and public-sector experience. On average, they spend longer hours in work activities per week than research office managers, being heavily involved in identification and marketing of intellectual property (IP), patenting and licensing IP to existing and start-up companies. Overall, they are highly critical of the management of their own universities, both generally and with regard to research commercialization, and give relatively low effectiveness ratings to the efforts of both Commonwealth and State governments to support research commercialization and innovation.