Evaluating the social returns to innovation: An application to university technology transfer

A fundamental problem in articulating the societal benefits of technology transfer is the lack of hard empirical evidence on the economic gains associated with this activity. To fill this gap, we apply the framework and methods developed by Griliches and Mansfield et al. to assess the social returns to university-based inventions. This methodology can be used to derive explicit measures of key metrics, such as social rates of return and benefit-to-cost ratios characteristic of specific new technologies. A case study is used to illustrate the application of this method.