Font Size:     

The technology transfer from technological institutes to enterprises is a subject of increasing interest for the development of Innovation National Systems. For the purpose of fostering technology transfer, it becomes crucial to identify those technological institutes of relatively high performance. Likewise, it is interesting to show the characteristics of those organizations as well as the way by which they use inputs to produce the expected outputs. The DEA model constructs an efficient frontier with those observations of relatively best perfomance; it shows for each inefficient unit what are the reasons behind such a low perfomance; and finally, it determines efficiency targets for each inefficient unit. This article seeks to identify the efficiency frontier from a sample of Spanish and Brazilian technological institutes and what may be the paths to improve the current performance. Our results inform about the standard characteristics of a technological institute operating in the frontier; the priorities among production targets: and the great difference in efficiency levels within the sample. Our conclusions show that there may be a significant scope for improvement and the need of practice review in the process of technological transfer.