Analysis of Turkish technology transfer offices' impact on local economic growth: A quantitative approach

As Schumpeter argues, societies are transitioning into a knowledge-based economic system where innovation is crucial for progress. The relation between innovation and economic development has become the focus of many scholars and policy-makers. With the growing number of studies and research on innovation and growth, the perspective on innovation which considered capital and high-skilled labor as only determinants of innovation, has faded. The innovation process includes commercialization of knowledge to create an economic value. Recent studies emphasize that innovation process relies on producing new knowledge as well as recombining existing knowledge. Therefore, it is essential to support knowledge sharing between actors within a knowledge-based economy to increase innovation creation. Literature identifies the main actors of a knowledge-based economy as university, industry, and government. To define the framework of our study, we follow the Triple Helix Model. The Triple Helix Model is a theoretical framework that models the interactions between these agents and the dynamics of a knowledge-based economy. The growing awareness on the transfer of technology in innovation ecosystems led universities to establish Technology Transfer Offices to mediate collaborations with industry. By bringing together academia and industry and acting as a knowledge broker, TTOs encourage technology transfer. Turkey started improving its innovation ecosystem to adapt to knowledge-based economy in late 1990s and started its technology transfer initiatives in early 2000s. As a part of these initiatives, many TTOs were established all around Turkey. This study focuses on the impact of Technology Transfer Offices on local economic growth at city-level. Since the conditions differ from city to city, we follow a two-way two-step Sys-GMM approach, a dynamic panel data analysis method, to identify the impact and to reach a generalizable result for Turkish innovation ecosystem. Our results indicate that there is a positive limited effect of TTOs.