Universities told to scrap external tech transfer offices

Cumbersome system costs more than it generates through innovative companies, critics say

Technology transfer offices at Norway’s higher education institutions are not working well in their present incarnation, according to Kyrre Lekve, vice-president of the Simula Research Laboratory.

In Norwegian universities the entire management of intellectual property rights has been entrusted to external bodies—the TTOs. In a public comment, Lekve said that scrapping such offices would improve the weak rate of research commercialisation among the country’s academia.