Metrics for the Evaluation of Knowledge Transfer Activities at Universities

for his intellectual input and valuable contributions with regards to facilitating the focus groups and interviews with the US Senior Technology Transfer Officials. The project has been made possible thanks to funding and valuable input from: 1 Following these discussions, the participating stakeholders defined in step three a framework of the key mechanisms of knowledge transfer and associated measures of their quantity and quality. Importantly, this framework reflected the views of all three stakeholder groups and was not biased towards any particular one of them. Fourth, we populated this new framework with publicly available data from UK universities and with commercial data to perform an initial benchmark analysis, focusing on a subset of 20 universities. Finally, we carried out an international comparison with the US and Canada to determine how UK universities perform at knowledge transfer relative to these countries. The most important result of this report is a new tool to measure knowledge transfer. It offers specific metrics to assess both the quantity and the quality of nine different facets of knowledge transfer from UK universities. These metrics are shown in Table I. Additionally, the development of this framework, together with our initial benchmark analysis, has led to four important conclusions about the UK knowledge transfer process: 1) Our results clearly show that universities should focus on directly measuring the knowledge transfer activities that they undertake, which are represented in the grey box in the Knowledge Transfer Model outlined in Figure I. More specifically, universities should concentrate on measuring the outputs (direct 1 Executive Summary Knowledge transfer from academic research into the commercial sphere is an important part of the innovation ecosystem which has large economic and societal impacts. Until now, however, it has been difficult to measure how successfully universities engage in such transfer activities, mainly because there was no agreed set of measurement tools. To improve this situation, the stakeholders involved in the process of knowledge transfer need to find and agree on a common way to define, quantify and qualify the performance of knowledge transfer activities of universities. This report, commissioned by Unico, the UK's leading Technology Transfer association, is a first step towards such a solution. We have developed here a new set of robust metrics for the evaluation of knowledge transfer activities at UK universities, in a five-step process. First, we identified the major stakeholders of knowledge transfer: the research funders, who fund the …