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The university's role in reaping the benefits from research by transforming knowledge and technology into commercially usable forms is becoming increasingly important. In this article, we seek to deepen the understanding of the technology transfer office (TTO). TTOs are primarily responsible for the protection of university created intellectual property (IP) and the management of the commercialization process. The aim of this study is to determine which internal efficiency factors are statistically significant for the efficiency of TTOs, and which barriers cited in literature are experienced by TTOs, and to, furthermore, compare these between developed and developing economies. To achieve this objective, we created a survey that was sent to 103 TTO's distributed in 21 countries. Our results demonstrate that it is apparent that developed economies (EU and UK) have overcome certain barriers experienced by developing economies (BRA, ISA and SA). Additionally, this paper has shown that TTOs have a built-in conflict with researchers. The results also emphasize the important role of networking and industry links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]