The impact of the Intellectual Property Rights Act for publicly funded research and development on technology transfer offices at South African universities

Abstract

The impact of the Intellectual Property Rights Act for publicly funded research and development on technology transfer offices was studied, using a questionnaire survey and guided interviews of six technology transfer officers. The survey requested technology transfer officers to express the impact level of each of the eleven impact elements on the four stages of intellectual property development – these being intellectual property creation, disclosure, protection and commercialisation. The set of data was weighted for each element, by intellectual property development stage, and analysed using frequency tables. The impact elements of „structural and resource requirements to commercialise and manage intellectual property‟, „intellectual property detection process by the technology transfer officers‟, and‟ disclosure process‟ were ranked as the top three impact elements, in that respective order. Narrative inquiry and theme extraction allowed further elaboration of the impact elements. Comparison with Staphorst‟s (2010) results showed that the impact elements were different for science councils, pointing to unique requirements by universities in their intellectual property management systems. The results of this analysis clearly indicate that the Intellectual Property Rights Act enforcement and execution will demand a high degree of structural and resource requirements, particularly, and most importantly, at the intellectual property disclosure stage of intellectual property development. Copyright