Technology Transfer Results Achieved by Hungarian SMES and Academic Institutions

Abstract The paper deals with some issues of technology transfer (TT) taking into account some politics and economy during the past 10-15 years in Hungary. TT is concerned as transfer of knowledge from ‘academia’ to ‘industry'. We are not going to analyze TT in general, just through some cases where university teachers and academic researchers started to be part of the real, market economy by means of bringing their knowledge to the private sphere, forming small enterprises (SME) to take part in industrial competition. Some ‘academicians’ completely gave up their academic positions forming either spin-offs or completely independent companies. Some other teaching and research people have part-time jobs as private entrepreneurs, keeping strong ties with their research institutes or universities. Examples of different types of successful TT related SMEs will be given, too.