Technology transfer managers are a new group of specialist professionals engaged in facilitating transfer of university research discoveries and inventions to business firms and other research users. With relatively high academic qualifications and enjoying higher salaries than many other comparable university staff, technology transfer managers tend to have been recruited from outside the higher education sector, having had significant commercial and public-sector experience. On average, they spend longer hours in work activities per week than research office managers, being heavily involved in identification and marketing of intellectual property (IP), patenting and licensing IP to existing and start-up companies. Overall, they are highly critical of the management of their own universities, both generally and with regard to research commercialization, and give relatively low effectiveness ratings to the efforts of both Commonwealth and State governments to support research commercialization and innovation.

This report investigates the impacts of different forms of transaction costs upon the effectiveness of legal and institutional structures intended to improve urban and peri-urban water management. The report is based upon detailed investigation of the implementation of water management policy in peri-urban Sydney.

Empirical studies from the field of existential psychology point to the possibility that the fear of death could be contributing to a lack of compliance with environmental regulations. A key theory within the field of experimental existential psychology, Terror Management Theory, has shown that reminders of mortality affect a broad range of behaviours; in many cases including activities that have little or no logical connection to death. Studies in this area have also shown that increased awareness of death can be triggered by a range of events, again, some seemingly unrelated to mortality. Terror Management Theory has been applied to other non-compliance behaviours, and its potential links with environmental regulatory noncompliance warrant investigation. This paper sets out a number of pathways by which the fear of death may be a factor in primary producer environmental regulatory non-compliance, together with examples of empirical studies which support the validity of each component of these paths.