The journey of intellectual property rights in Turkish universities: from invention to commercialization

Patents and commercialization have been an important issue for all countries, whether developed or developing. Ideally, the goal of countries would be to augment their patents and commercialize them to develop new technologies that contribute to economic growth. For this purpose, many countries develop different tools and implement a variety of policies. Some of them have succeeded and some are still in progress. Turkey is one of those countries that aims to increase the number of inventions and successfully convert them into technology intensive goods with the help of universities. For this purpose, in the mid-1990s, Turkey developed and implemented different mechanisms and tools. In this chapter, I summarize Turkey’s last 30 years to show how the country proceeded, what kind of mechanisms it developed, and what the results were. A key lesson is that Turkey employed different and results-oriented programs to facilitate commercialization among industries and universities and provided different grant schemes for this purpose. Although there have been significant improvements in commercialization outcomes, Turkey has not reached its desired level. Nevertheless, it is crucial for Turkey to implement effective policies in universities to benefit from their intellectual assets.