Super-efficiency DEA model for evaluating technology transfer performance of U.S. university

American research universities have been allowed to receive license income from licensing patent rights to private sectors for further development and commercialization after the passage of University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act (Bayh-Dole Act) in 1980. The Act made huge fundamental and policy change in encouraging universities to rapidly increase their patenting and licensing activities. In the age of fundamental change, technology management especially technology transfer performance (TTP) has become an important issue among the entire American research universities. Nowadays, due to the complexity of patenting and licensing activities, a direct and precisely TTP evaluation and comparison is usually important but difficult. Unfortunately, few studies have devoted to proposing an objective and quantitative mechanism or technique for precisely evaluating TTP so far. Therefore, this study employs and compares two alternative data envelopment analysis (DEA) models - Charnes-Cooper-Rhodes (CCR) and supper-efficiency slack-based measure (SBM) to determine relative efficiencies and to measure the slack values among universities on the basis of AUTM licensing survey data whereby TTP is transformed into monetary value. Our research results will be able to sort the performance and provide managerial suggestions for each university to improve their TTP.