Portuguese and Spanish universities have adopted well-defined royalty sharing schedules over the last fifteen years. We investigate whether such royalty sharing schedules have been effective in stimulating inventors' efforts and in ultimately improving university outcomes. We base our empirical analysis on university-level data and two new self-collected surveys for both inventors and Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs). Evidence from the inventors' survey indicates that one third of respondents are incentivised by current royalty sharing schedules, one third could be incentivised by higher royalty shares, and the remaining third is totally insensitive to royalty sharing. Plain regressions on university level datasets suggest that the incentive effects documented by the inventors' survey fail to translate into increased patenting or licensing income. It would seem that inventor royalty shares are not as influential as they could be, due to the poor commercial prospects of university inventions. Among other possible reasons, these poor prospects appear to reflect the fact that inventors are unable to produce potentially licensable inventions, or that eventually TTOs may not be focussing enough on commercialising their inventions.

This paper assesses the performance of GAPIs and OTICs, two different types of university technology transfer offices that have been active in Portuguese higher education institutions, since 2000 and 2006, respectively. Data originating from a survey of these offices were analysed through both cluster analysis and the estimation of a Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) model. Results show that the institutional nature of each of the surveyed organisations implies different behaviours and outputs. Furthermore, it is shown that the resources and activities of the surveyed offices determine their performance concurrently with regard to technology transfer, licencing contracts and technology-based spin-offs. The results of this study may be particularly relevant for countries that are in the process of developing their university technology transfer activities, as they can help to shape policies in relation to TTOs' funding and resource allocation during the earlier stages of these activities.

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