Here we will summarise the following important issues related to the organisation of the pro-gramme and the strategies of the TTOs.
• The present organisation of FORNY is characterised by being a decentralised and loosely coupled system. The programme has a small secretariat with limited resources, and its main task is to coordinate activities and allocate resources to the participating TTOs. The secretariat has limited capacity for a more active involvement in developing the strategies of the programme, like being more actively involved in the coordination of the efforts of the individual TTOs. Thus, a question for further discussion is if the present organisation of the programme is optimal, or if it rather should be organised with a stronger coordinating body.
• The present system of TTOs is fairly fragmented. There is no clear structure of organisa-tion and specialisaorganisa-tion, the most important principle of organisaorganisa-tion is that of regionalisa-tion; to a lesser extent the TTOs are specialised on disciplines or types of commercialisa-tions. The collaboration between the TTOs is not well developed. Thus, an important issue for the future is how a more specialised and coordinated structure of the TTOs can be de-veloped.
• While some of the TTOs are well embedded in the strategies of their mother institutions, like most of the TTOs that are directed towards the institutes and some of those serving the universities, others are not. Although the mechanisms of commercialisation are com-plicated, an important factor that may explain the good performance of some of the TTOs is how the mother institution has adopted commercialisation as part of its main strategy, and that working with commercialisation projects is regarded as an integral part of the activity of the institution.
• The working conditions for TTOs are quite diverse. While the TTOs serving research insti-tutes may specialise in specific technologies and thus easily can be integrated in the acti-vities of their mother institutions, the situation of the TTOs serving the universities are more complex; they deal with researchers from different disciplines, the incentives for researchers to commercialise are limited, and it is often unclear to what extent the univer-sity actually prioritise commercialisation activities.
• The TTOs have so far not succeeded in bringing up a sufficient number of projects with a great potential for commercialisation. Although there might be several explanations for this, which will be discussed in the final chapter, the strategy of the TTOs for searching and selecting ideas are important factors. The strategies pursued so far by many of the TTOs have not been successful as their resources to a significant extent have been tied up in projects with limited prospects for exits. Consequently, in the future it should be con-sidered to direct the FORNY programme towards more selective strategies. An important aspect of this is how the TTOs can learn from the experiences of the most successful TTOs, and how the FORNY programme should be organised in the future in order to facilitate such learning processes.
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• The TTOs that generate substantial results seem to have staff with more generic discipli-nary competence and industrial experience. This leads us to a discussion of what types of competence the TTOs should have and what role a TTO should have. As described in Chap-ter 3 a TTO might move in two directions; technology transfer or towards an entrepreneu-rial university model. The latter has to some extent served as the original model of the FORNY-programme with the programme’s focus on developing spin-offs. Defined broadly, the role of the TTO is to facilitate technology transfer and to engage in boundary spanning activities between the research institutions and industry. The results in this chapter indi-cate that especially the latter part is difficult. Thus, a point for discussion is whether the TTOs are staffed with the necessary competence to execute their tasks.
5 FORNY start-ups, commercialisations and firm performance
The most important output measure for the FORNY program is the number and quality of commercialisations. A commercialisation is realised either if a project leads to a firm start-up (from here we use the term “FORNY start-up”) or a licensing agreement. In this chapter, we focus on FORNY start-ups. The FORNY program operates with a set of requirement that have to be met before a TTO can register a commercialisation. Below, we list the most relevant re-quirements6
1. A commercialisation is realised through a licensing or a firm start-up. The commerciali-sation may relate to the development of products, processes or methods/ solutions.
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2. The commercialisation must show a potential for operational profitability. A feasible bu-siness plan must be presented, together with a realistic plan for financing the venture be-fore the firm is fully up and running.
3. The business plan must be based on knowledge or research developed in a Norwegian university, college, research institute or university hospital.
4. Intellectual property rights relating to the business plan must be settled in due legal agreements.
5. The commercialisation must bring forward a potential for value creation in Norway.
In this chapter, we take a closer look at the firms that have been categorized as a commerciali-sation. It is outside the scope of this report to evaluate the quality of the business and finan-cing plans and the IPR agreements that form the basis for the commercialisations in points two and four above. We are particularly concerned with the economic performance of the start-ups over time. We specifically focus on output growth and the factors that have to be in place to facilitate growth in knowledge and research based start-ups. The most central factor here is access to capital in order to finance a relatively long period of costly product develop-ment and marketing. We also attempt to enrich the concept of commercialisations by catego-rizing the start-ups according to the degree of commercial success. This is important since the FORNY start-ups display a wide variety of development paths. Most firms remain small, unpro-fitable and without signs of growth, but a few appear as successful ventures. The main ques-tion to be answered is whether the successful cases are sufficiently many in number and whether they are sufficiently successful to fulfil the objectives of the FORNY-programme.
It is important to notice that the role of the TTOs ideally ends when the start-up is established and the commercialization is successfully registered. An evaluation of the economic perfor-mance of the FORNY start-ups must be based on the fact that the TTOs and the FORNY pro-gram is (at least in principal) not really a part of the firm during the period that we map. Yet, in reality, the TTOs must follow FORNY start-ups for a long time, supporting them with several kinds of services. One reason for this prolonged relationship between the TTOs and the FORNY
6 The requirement list is based on the RCN letter on Specification of obtained commercialisations. Some requirements with minor relevance for start-ups are left out.
75 start-ups relates to ownership. As shown in chapter 4.5, The TTOs hold ownership in 147 FORNY start-ups. If the TTO holds an ownership share in the company, the TTO has a clear in-centive to follow up the firm until new owners take over. Most often, new owners are hard to find.
Nevertheless, even though the TTOs and the FORNY programme are detached from the FORNY start-ups at an early stage, the economic performance must be regarded as an impor-tant indicator on the ability of the FORNY programme to develop ventures that eventually grow into sustainable and fast growing firms that contribute to national welfare.