Institutional Futures of Ecuador’s Knowledge and Technology Transfer System

National Knowledge and Technology Transfer Systems can be understood as functional coordination architectures nested within National Innovation Systems: they organize the interfaces through which knowledge is translated, exchanged, absorbed, used, and evaluated. This study examines which structural drivers govern Ecuador’s transfer system, how stakeholder power conditions action on those drivers, and which joint configurations are plausible toward 2040. A sequential French-school foresight design connected MICMAC, MACTOR, and SMIC-Prob-Expert through the same six strategic conditions. Eight competence-screened experts formed an intensive analytical workgroup and refined 33 candidate drivers to 30; within-panel agreement was very high (Kendall’s W = 0.929, p < 0.001). MICMAC identified six highly interdependent leverage variables: technological absorptive capacity, public STI policy, innovation ecosystem maturity, knowledge-transfer culture, national-system governance, and Technology Transfer Offices (OTTs). MACTOR showed that formal authority is concentrated in finance, planning, and productive-policy actors, whereas OTTs combine high structural importance with low actor power. SMIC generated 64 configurations. Scenario 111110 ranked first by lower bound, mean, median, and upper bound and was the only configuration represented in all eight contrasted solutions; it combines progress in five conditions without OTT consolidation. The results identify an authority–implementation gap and show why partial institutional modernization is more robust than comprehensive transformation. The contribution is a traceable, non-additive integration of structural salience, actor feasibility, and joint plausibility for long-term STI policy design.