국가연구개발 사업화 정책에 대한 비판적 고찰(Assessing the commercialization policy of Korea’s national research and development projects)

The year 2000 saw an active undertaking of policy in Korea to transfer the R&D achievements of public research institutes to the private sector and commercialize them. To respond to the needs of a multitude of actors, the policies were promoted by various ministries. However, despite the growing public awareness thanks to the implementation of numerous policy projects, concerns have been raised over their performance which have been overshadowed by the cost of national R&D. Although, there are a number of studies that attempt a general approach to research and policies centered on factors that promote technology transfer and commercialization, quantitative research on the effectiveness of policy is rare. Accordingly, this study analyzed the effectiveness of a financial support project that fosters university technology transfer offices by using the Quantile Regression method and Stochastic Frontier analysis. The policy was implemented three times; from 2006 to 2010; from 2011 to 2015 and; from 2016 to 2018. And, the data related to the technology transfer activities of universities was complied from 2007 to 2015 (nine years). As such, an examination was conducted on the effects of the second phase project (2011-2015) implemented during the data-availability period. The samples used in the analysis were formed of a total of 127 universities. All were four-year universities that earned royalty income at least once during the nine years, excluding universities that had lower than 10% of the average technology transfer fee during 2013-2015. Firstly, the determinants of the technology transfer performance of the university group were analyzed according to the technology transfer capacity using the Quantile Regression method. The results revealed that the number of staff members at the technology transfer office and cumulative number of domestic patents were important determinants regardless of the technology transfer performance. On the other hand, the significance of the determinants, such as the total amount of research funding, the cumulative number of foreign patents, and operation expenses for university—academia cooperation, were estimated differently for each quintile. In particular, the government's policy beneficiaries showed a significant positive effect on technology transfer revenues only in the lower 10% groups. Next, we examined the effect of government policy on the technical efficiency of the technology transfer office using the Stochastic Frontier analysis method. It was found that the government policy improves the efficiency of the organization on average. However, it was estimated that the marginal effect of the government policy is larger for a technology transfer office belonging to a university that is small in size or has a low research capacity (research grant, patent hold). These results lead to the ironic conclusion that government policies that support universities with relatively good research capacity and technology transfer were more effective for the groups that did not target them. Until now, the support policy for university technology transfer offices has been somewhat monotonous in terms of the implementation and amount of subsidy, which do not conform to the principle of preferentially nurturing a group with excellent competence. For this reason, there is not enough support for high performing universities and the hurdles are too high for low performing universities who have a strong will to transfer technology. In addition, although universities who lack research capacity and financing conditions are required to expand their capacity prior to the activation of technology transfer activities, these points are not fully taken into account in the policy design. Also, it is necessary to activate the regional technology transfer center (RTTC) to prevent excessive waste of resources.