The development of Taiwan IC industry has moved in a rapid pace from manufacturing to design, shift from the follower to become the leader in the industry.
The strength in mass production has been utilized and more diversity demands of customization which weakens the strength of traditional mass production. Less time-spending for time-to-market, enterprises devote to cost-down and short producing period. More globalization and alliances, more competitions exist between businesses.
Nowadays, enterprises pay more attention on intangible assets which can create higher profits. The patent is the most important intangible asset in the organizations. For universities, there are many outstanding faculty members and rich resource for developing the useful technology. Once the R&D results come out, the academia would like to patent it and transfer it to industry. This study tries to construct the strategies in how to market or promote the intellectual property in university to the industry. Through understanding weight of each criterion which affected successful technology transfer helps both university and industry realize the importance ranking of factors at university aspect. From an industrial aspect, it could help them find useful technology and get revenue through commercialization. It also benefits the university because of the more technology transferring; the more monetary income could fund the further research.
That would be a win-win solution.
This chapter consists of four sections. The first one introduces the development of IC industry. The second one covers the problem discussion. The third part illustrates research motivation and purpose. The last one forms the framework of this thesis.
1.1 Background
In the past, enterprises depended on the tangible assets like land and machines as the competitive advantages. Those who had more tangible assets were more powerful in the marketplace. Along with knowledge economy age approaching, the value of intangible assets is more important than the early ages. Knowledge workers create high benefits to company because of their intelligence. The intelligence in the brain needs no big space for storing, but creates high profits to the company. The intelligence is called intellectual property (IP) which includes patents, copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks. Patent, one of these properties, is especially significant to the IC industry, it spurs researchers to innovate new technology and bring the progressive power for the entire industry.
1.2 Problem Identification
Inventors always want to market their technology to produce physical products in order to be used by costumers. The completed process results in a success of innovation. Either faculties of university or engineers of company would like to see their new ideas be used for manufacturing new products, and then they can gain additional profit from their innovation. Thus, the marketing process is important to each innovator since they want to market their innovation. Many inventions belong to National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), and hopefully they will be used by the industry through using effective marketing ways, which is the purpose of this study.
As there is limited resource of Technology Licensing Office (TLO), the arrangement of the resource is a very important issue in order to boost the usage of inventions. According to the interviews, most of faculties think there is a lot work needed to be done to innovation promotion. It is not only a big issue for NCTU, but also for other universities. Marketing strategies are needed to promote goods and services, so do research results.
1.3 Research Motivation and Research Purpose
Since 1960s, Taiwan’s IC industry development has been moving in a rapid pace, transferring from the OEM role to self-brand made; the typical examples like Acer and ASUS. Enterprises focus on their intangible assets, to understand self-own assets value.
Through the patent analysis could know the competitive ability of rival company will be discovered and infringement will also be avoided. The academia has many outstanding faculties and plenty resources. The prior strength of academic organizations is the devotion to study, to research and to contribute to the industry. But the problem is there is no effective mechanism for marketing these research results.
National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) is one of the best research universities in Taiwan; it has been picked up as the case study sample. Interview and questionnaire are used to find out several ways to do the effective promotion of research result for NCTU.
The sample is divided into two main groups, technology licensing officials and faculties.
The quantitative data of questionnaire are used to find out the different thoughts between these two groups. The qualitative information, which consists of several open questions, is used to construct the marketing strategies.
A preemptive strategic move is the pioneering implementation of a strategy into a business area. Because it is the first, generates an asset or competence that forms the basis of a sustainable competitive advantage. For a preemptive move to create
“first-mover advantages,” competitors must inhibit or prevent from duplicating or countering it (Aaker, 2001).
Intellectual property can be regarded as a “product” because it can be traded. So, the marketing concepts are important to intellectual property, too. Marketing stars with the fact of human needs and wants (Kotler, 1994). Among the process of technology transfer (can be regarded as transaction), the vender (university) should understand what the customer (industry) needs. This study would construct the IP marketing strategy for
NCTU, in order to transfer its-owned IP to the industry. Through this process, companies would get the new technology and build more convenient and useful product to customers. And the profit of school is the royalty or licensing fee or the fund for further research from the industry.
1.4 Research Content
Chapter 2 covers the literature reviews which conclude intellectual property, technology transfer and marketing strategy. That illustrates several terminology and concepts. It also lists key factors of technology transfer. Chapter 3 presents the research process and methodology. The algorithm used in this study is called Analytical Hierarchy Process approach. Chapter 4 shows the results, the analysis and the findings.
This chapter also concludes the analysis of the results from the different aspects. And the last chapter, chapter 5 consists of discussions and conclusions, providing marketing strategies and recommendations.