Research commercialisation performance in different types of universities: case from Taiwan

Driven by developing trends in technological innovations and the knowledge economy, universities have reoriented their mission to a greater or lesser extent to focus on innovation and entrepreneurialism, a phenomenon referred to as the “entrepreneurial university”. This research explores differences in endowments for various types of universities in Taiwan and benchmarks their research commercialisation performance. Taking 80 representative universities in Taiwan as the sample, statistical tests are conducted to examine the differences between types of universities in terms of their size, funding amount and source, and patent performance. Statistical tests show significant differences between public and private universities in terms of student numbers, amount of government funding, and number of US patents secured. DEA results identify 14 most efficient universities in terms of research commercialisation, of which eight are private. The benchmark analysis classifies universities into peer groups and provides weights for the input and output variables.