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

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.