Royalty sharing, effort and invention in universities: Evidence from Portugal and Spain

Abstract

Portuguese and Spanish universities have adopted well-defined royalty sharing arrangements over the last fifteen years. We investigate whether such royalty sharing arrangements 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 arrangements, one third could be incentivised by higher royalty shares, and the remaining third is totally insensitive to royalty sharing.