Supporting University Technology Transfer - Struggles And Barriers In Latvia

The goal of enhancing science-industry cooperation with the aim to boost countries’ innovation performance has been a part of various development strategies in European countries for quite some time and an array of incentives is targeted at elements of national innovation systems in order to facilitate university technology transfer. This paper aims to discuss these incentives in Latvia - a small country in transition, with a relatively poor innovation performance and with a pressure to shape its industrial and research policies towards industrial development and sustainable growth. Latvia is a country still recovering from the recent financial crisis and trying to overcome the problems of the past when it was a part of the Soviet Union - a background that gives specific characteristics for the environment in which researchers and firms operate. This paper focuses on the chosen policy mix and incentives for supporting science-industry linkages in Latvia and how it matches the structure of the economy. We suggest that the chosen approach (which is more often than not inspired by foreign success stories) fails and causes a mismatch between both realms and thus slows down the improvement as it tries to address not the causes of low cooperation such as business sector’s low innovation absorption capacity that impacts technology transfer processes in a significant way, but instead alleviates the symptoms e.g. low R&D expenditure. We use case study approach, relying on desk research, interviews with key policy makers as our data sources.