Technology Transfer in Poland

Poznan was my first visit of Poland. I was invited to talk about the technology transfer practice at ETH Zurich as part of the Opencode Transfer project which deals with the development of a new technology transfer process for Polish universities in greater Poznan region.
 I was presenting on the characteristics of ETH Zurich’s spin-offs such as longer survival rates, job creation, and value generation as the main motivation for fostering entrepreneurship at universities.

Swiss practises on the technology transfer, licensing and encoding methods on Prezi

Throughout the following panel discussion I learned about significant differences between Poland, Switzerland and US. Whereas ETH transfer mainly functions as a service center supporting ETH employees to commercialize scientific results, in Poland university rather see transfer offices as profit centers which should generate surpluses out of licenses, patents and shares of spin-offs. Also other participants underlined that this approach might be hardly successful when looking at the numbers of US universities such as Stanford or Univ. of Illinois, where only 4% of submitted patents finally materialize in transferred licenses.

Overall, I was fascinated by the entrepreneurial spirit and the strong ambition of technology transfer from research to practice in Poznan.