Commercialization of technologies out of US universities

U.S. academic research institutions spent public and private funds of 54 billion dollars solely in 2009. This is a significant investment considering recent harsh economic downturn. While there exists public acknowledgement of importance of unremitting investment on research and development, U.S. research institutions still struggle to validate their performance and get reliable support from public and private stakeholders. Therefore, measuring their economic contribution based on robust and realistic approach is critical to improve their practices and secure sustainable growth by attracting more interests of taxpayer. Therefore, this paper contributes to a new approach which integrated the steps of identification of time-lags in licensing, efficiency change analysis and exploration of the influence of organizational characteristics on licensing performance. The study also included an innovative approach to resolve issues with the super efficiency DEA model, including mathematical infeasibility and zero data considerations. The results which are grounded on the comprehensive observations over multiple time durations provide an insight into the licensing practices of US research institutions.