<p>Legislative changes in the U.S. and more recently Germany, require universities and research institutes to act as entrepreneurs, something that is not necessarily in their nature. Therefore, a number of Technology Transfer Organizations or Evaluation Agencies have been established to handle the evaluation, patenting and commercialization of inventions. The process of evaluating inventions, in this thesis termed DEAR, poses two major challenges for evaluation agencies: (1) the process must be aimed at keeping the inventions that will generate revenues and filtering out those that will not; and (2) the time spent on evaluation should be kept to a minimum, but must never be reduced below the point where potential commercial successes will be lost. The purpose of this thesis is to benchmark the practices of evaluation agencies in order to establish whether time can be reduced in any part of the DEAR process and if so where. We find that there are aspects in almost every stage of the DEAR process that could be made more effective. For instance, it may be worthwhile for the German agencies to reflect on the fact that their U.S. counterparts generally seem to rely on the scientific information given in the disclosure. Also, even though valuation of inventions often becomes a case of"Garbage In - Garbage Out", such valuation may be worthwhile for younger agencies since it may signal that the DEAR process is conducted in a thorough and accurate manner.</p>

Legislative changes in the U.S. and more recently Germany, require universities and research institutes to act as entrepreneurs, something that is not necessarily in their nature. Therefore, a number of Technology Transfer Organizations or Evaluation Agencies have been established to handle the evaluation, patenting and commercialization of inventions. The process of evaluating inventions, in this thesis termed DEAR, poses two major challenges for evaluation agencies: (1) the process must be aimed at keeping the inventions that will generate revenues and filtering out those that will not; and (2) the time spent on evaluation should be kept to a minimum, but must never be reduced below the point where potential commercial successes will be lost. The purpose of this thesis is to benchmark the practices of evaluation agencies in order to establish whether time can be reduced in any part of the DEAR process and if so where. We find that there are aspects in almost every stage of the DEAR process that could be made more effective. For instance, it may be worthwhile for the German agencies to reflect on the fact that their U.S. counterparts generally seem to rely on the scientific information given in the disclosure. Also, even though valuation of inventions often becomes a case of"Garbage In - Garbage Out", such valuation may be worthwhile for younger agencies since it may signal that the DEAR process is conducted in a thorough and accurate manner.