Semester of Graduation

Fall 2017

Degree

Master of Science in Industrial Engineering (MSIE)

Department

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The technology transfer and commercialization encompasses various activities involved in acquiring intellectual property rights for the inventions, marketing of the inventions, and diffusing into the public domain through commercialization. Although many scholars have studied technology transfer within the academic institutions' context, the process has been assumed to be sequential. The technology transfer process is a complex process to be generalized as a linear sequential process. A mixed methods approach has been used to triangulate the findings from the literature review and descriptive analyses to conceptualize an alternative model that reflects the actual process more accurately. It was found that the most used current models used do not reflect when each activity occurs, each activity’s predecessors and successors, and the concurrent behavior of the activities. Similarly, the current methods and metrics of technology transfer performance lack a deep understanding of the process, start- and end-point of each step, and the interactions between each step. In order to overcome these problems, three process-based metrics using the United States Patent and Trademark Office data sources are proposed. The measurement of each metric was illustrated using Louisiana State University as a case study, and it was found that the performance of the technology transfer office can be further improved to reduce the processing time of each invention.

Date

8-9-2017

Committee Chair

Nahmens, Isabelina

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.4307

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