Why so few autonomous technology transfer offices? Organizational form choice in public research organizations in an emerging economy

Seven years after Brazil’s 2016 reform of the Innovation Law allowed public research organizations (PROs) to establish legally autonomous technology transfer offices (TTOs), uptake remained negligible. Drawing on administrative data obtained through freedom of information requests to Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, covering the 223 public PROs among the ministry’s 299 FORMICT respondents (public and private) for base year 2023, we find that fewer than 1% of public PROs have adopted the autonomous form; all 18 autonomous TTOs identified in public PROs are linked to just two organizations. Combining this baseline with document analysis of the innovation policies of eight reference PROs and interviews with domain experts and decision-makers about the broader institutional decision environment in which organizational-form choices occur, we examine why adoption diverges so sharply from the legal opportunity. The evidence is most consistent with the decision being shaped less by deliberate rejection than by an incremental decision architecture operating under limited information, short managerial horizons, and accountability pressures that favor defensible defaults. The findings extend the TTO literature by addressing the understudied question of how organizational form is chosen in emerging-economy PROs and offer policy implications for innovation-system governance.