Bridging Research to Industry: The Technology Transfer from Communication Perspective (A Case Study at The Centre for Agrobased Industry)

Abstract

In the 21st century, countries throughout the world face the need to change their focus on national strategic planning from a resource-based to a knowledgebased economy. Many countries increasingly use public research to generate economic benefit from the technological opportunity and use public research as their broad strategies in industrial development. Consequently, universities and public research institutions (PRIs) become key institutions in the process of economy “catch-up”. As public research conducted by PRIs and universities are increasingly needed, technology transfer and commercialization become critical areas that must be studied to help us understand how the process occurs. As one of the research institutions under the Ministry of Industry, the Centre for Agro-based Industry (CABI) is responsible to conduct research with a focus on the agro-based products. However, the research at CABI still have a relatively low application rate because most of the research were not commercially implemented in the industry. This research project aims to identify the role of communication in the technology transfer process that occurs in CABI and to suggest a way to maximize the number of CABI’s R&D application to the SMEs. The research uses a case study strategy, with an interpretive approach. Data collection method uses semi-structured interviews with respondents consist of CABI’s researchers and staff and SMEs. The data were analyzed by coding method. The result shows that there are ten communication channels used by CABI’s staff in technology transfer, namely: research collaboration; scientific publication; research dissemination; “client hunting” program; CABI’s events such as seminar and workshop; exhibition; free trial offer; leaflets or brochures; and Forum Group Discussion. It implies that the bureaucratic characteristic of CABI makes the organization not flexible in their internal communication and in their response to the market and it eventually effects the technology transfer process. The results also show that the interpersonal relationship between staffs in CABI seems to create a set of barriers in the technology transfer process. The research conclude that to deal with these problems, CABI must take different approach to make its mechanistic organization more organic and encourage daily internal interactions between staffs to increase their engagement toward their job and organization. Moreover, a set of intellectual property (IP) arrangement and incentives policy may avert the reluctance of the researcher in sharing his/her knowledge to other staffs. In term of communication channels. CABI must implement two phase of technology transfer process. The first step is to narrowing down the potential users and focus on one or two of them, and then CABI must maintain a good interactive process with the SMEs to make sure that their technology meets the need and capacity of the SMEs.