Knowledge and technology transfer plays a crucial role in connecting innovation stakeholders and moving inventions from creators to public and private users.
[4][5] Analysis in 2003 showed that the context,[6] or environment, and motives of each organization involved will influence the method of technology transfer employed.
The motives behind the technology transfer were not necessarily homogenous across organization levels, especially when commercial and government interests are combined.
IP protection gives academic institutions capacity to market their inventions, attract funding, seek industrial partners and assure dissemination of new technologies through means such as licensing or creation of start-ups for the benefit of society.
[8] Technology transfers may occur between universities, businesses (of any size, ranging from small, medium, to large), governments, across geopolitical borders, both formally and informally, and both openly and secretly.
Often it occurs by concerted effort to share skills, knowledge, technologies, manufacturing methods, samples, and facilities among the participants.
[10][11] Often these approaches are associated with raising of venture capital (VC) as a means of funding the development process, a practice common in the United States and the European Union.
Technology brokers are people who discovered how to bridge the emergent worlds and apply scientific concepts or processes to new situations or circumstances.
AUTM represents over 3,100 technology transfer professionals, and more than 800 universities, research centers, hospitals, businesses and government organizations.
The most frequently used informal means of technology transfer are through education, studies, professional exchange of opinions, movement of people, seminars, workshops.
There are numerous professional associations and TTO Networks enhancing different forms of collaboration among technology managers in order to facilitate this "informal" transfer of best practices and experiences.
It can involve licensing agreements or setting up joint ventures and partnerships to share both the risks and rewards of bringing new technologies to market.
WIPO supports its member states in establishing and developing TISCs in universities and other institutions in numerous countries around the world.
There has been a marked increase in technology transfer intermediaries specialized in their field since 1980, stimulated in large part by the Bayh–Dole Act and equivalent legislation in other countries, which provided additional incentives for research exploitation.
The term "partnership intermediary" means an agency of a state or local government—or a nonprofit entity owned, chartered, funded, or operated by or on behalf of a state or local government—that assists, counsels, advises, evaluates, or otherwise cooperates with small business firms; institutions of higher education defined in section 201(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 USC § 1141 [a]); or educational institutions within the meaning of section 2194 of Title 10, United States Code, that need or can make demonstrably productive use of technology-related assistance from a federal laboratory, including state programs receiving funds under cooperative agreements entered into under section 5121 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 (15 USC § 2781).
In this process Intellectual Property was part of the solution and an important tool for facilitation of affordable global access to COVID 19 treatments – as it was the case in two licensing agreements between Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) and pharmaceutical companies Merck and Pfizer.