MEASURING THE EU MEMBER STATES RD&I AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER PROCESS EFFICIENCY: A DEA APPROACH

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of the technology transfer process in the 27 EU member states in support of the strategies formulation to improve the efficiency of technology transfer processes. Therefore, a conceptual framework was proposed based on the efficiency of the RD&I system and technology transfer. Following this conceptual framework, two DEA models were applied to evaluate the efficiency of the two subprocesses (RD&I system and technology transfer). The results revealed some highly efficient DMUs, but also that a relatively large number of countries are inefficient in terms of one or both subprocesses of technology transfer. The article also presents a series of strategies that policy makers can adopt to directly or gradually improve technology transfer efficiency to reach countries with highly efficient transformation of human and financial resources allocated to RD&I into visible results in the economic sector.