TÜBİTAK 1513 — Turkey's Technology Transfer Office Support Program

TÜBİTAK 1513 is a national programme that funds Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) inside Turkish universities, explicitly to commercialise patents, broker university-industry licensing deals and support spin-off formation. It launched with 20 universities in 2013-2014 and runs in two phases ('Institutional Capacity Building' then 'Target Oriented Growth', up to five years each, ten years total support per TTO), co-financing 40-80% of TTO activity depending on measured performance.
Per TÜBİTAK's own March 2024 statement, the agency transferred a total of 88.3 million TL to the original 20-university cohort of TTOs over five years. TÜBİTAK's institutional patent portfolio, much of it processed through this TTO infrastructure, stood at 307 patent applications across 143 patent families in the agency's most recent published count.
This is the most self-critical of the practices in this batch: TÜBİTAK's own 2024 statement flagged that most TTOs showed 'low self-sufficiency' per 2016-2017 activity reports, which is why funding was redesigned to be performance-based rather than a flat rate. Independent peer-reviewed research (Ranga, Temel, Ar, Yeşilay & Sukan, 'Building Technology Transfer Capacity in Turkish Universities: A Critical Analysis', European Journal of Education 51(1), 2016) found Turkish university tech-transfer capacity to be early-stage, constrained by low technology/market orientation of research and weak IPR awareness — a genuine outside assessment, not the implementing agency's own framing.

Read the full analysis: https://tubitak.gov.tr/en/funds/sanayi/ulusal-destek-programlari/1513-technology-transfer-office-support-program