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The activities of university knowledge transfer offices: towards the third mission in Italy

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Abstract

Establishing deeper engagement with industry and society has recently become a key concern of universities. To pursue this goal, universities—as well as other public research organizations—have started to reorganize internal resources, to redefine their activities and policies, and to redesign their overall knowledge transfer (KT) business models. As a consequence, in several countries a wide heterogeneity exists in the types of KT models adopted and in the outcomes arising from KT activities. By performing a cluster analysis and a multinomial logit regression on an extensive dataset that almost covers the entire population of Italian universities, in this study we analyze (1) whether models of KT characterized by a broader engagement with society are gradually substituting models more focused on technology commercialization, and (2) which factors related to the availability of resources and universities’ strategic intention better explain existing differences. Insights from the study might help university managers to define the most appropriate actions to fully undertake the implementation of the university third mission.

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Notes

  1. Among the remaining universities that are not included in the NetVal survey, the largest fraction (11.5 %) is represented by “telematic universities”, which are specialized in distant (online) learning and that do not possess physical facilities to perform research activity. A smaller fraction (3.1 %) is represented by “universities for foreigners”, which are specialized in teaching Italian language, literature and culture, and that, similarly to “telematic universities”, are not involved in scientific/technological research. Finally, other excluded universities either have been very recently created, or are specialized in very narrow teaching areas (e.g., the University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004 by the international non-profit association Slow Food).

  2. Although a commonly accepted system of objective indicators to address both research and KT activities has not been developed yet (Bonaccorsi et al. 2006; Sánchez-Barrioluengo 2014), we argue that our variables cover most of the dimensions that concern university’s second and third missions.

  3. “Less than 10 years” and “more than 14 years” represent, respectively, the first and the fourth quartile of the distribution of the variable Experience computed for our sample universities. In this sense, Fig. 4 compares the behavior of the least experienced vs. the most experienced universities in terms of KT activity.

  4. Dendrograms are available upon request.

  5. Recall that in the cluster analysis only a measure of research impact was considered (i.e, NI), but no measures of research “amount” were included.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Claudia Daniele for her assistance in data collection and elaboration, Giorgio Calcagnini, Ilario Favaretto and participants to the International Conference on Technology Transfer (University of Urbino, October 30–31, 2014) for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Conflict of interest

Author Andrea Piccaluga is currently President of Netval (www.netval.it), the Italian network of University Technology Transfer Offices, which provided most of the data used in this study. Author Fabrizio Cesaroni declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Economics and Management (SEAM), University of Messina, Piazza Pugliatti, 1, 98122, Messina, Italy

    Fabrizio Cesaroni

  2. Istituto di Management, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Piazza Martiri della Libertà, 33, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Fabrizio Cesaroni & Andrea Piccaluga

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  1. Fabrizio Cesaroni
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Correspondence to Fabrizio Cesaroni.

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Cesaroni, F., Piccaluga, A. The activities of university knowledge transfer offices: towards the third mission in Italy. J Technol Transf 41, 753–777 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-015-9401-3

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