Abstract:

Since the European Union launched its Lisbon declaration and the Innovation Union the economic and social impact of university research and education has been on the political agenda. Universities are expected to collaborate with and transfer knowledge to established companies and public organizations as well as stimulating researchers and students to commercialize their knowledge through new firms. The call for “impact” has not been received by academics with open arms. On the contrary some academics resist this call and others do not feel that the university has the competence or the organization to do this effectively. This paper presents the result of survey to 50 heads of departments at a major Swedish university with some 45.000 students about their view of strengths and weaknesses of their departments in order to effectively create impact on the society.

The result of the survey shows that different faculties have very different view of collaboration with and creating impact on the society. While the engineering, medical and natural science faculties in general are positive towards collaboration with industry and public organizations, social science, arts and humanistic faculties have more problematic view of collaboration activities. In general the heads of departments see five major areas for re-organization of university activities in order to be able to collaborate more effectively and make an impact.

These are:
1) Better visibility of existing collaboration activities and better dialogue with existing and potential collaboration partners, a lot of collaboration is already going on but it is not visible inside the university organization and communicated externally,
2) A more strategic approach and selection of collaboration partners, some partners are better partners that will add to research and educational quality,
3) Better support for bottom-up multi-disciplinary processes at the university in order to be able to organize research and education directed at societal challenges such as environmental challenges,
4) better organizational plattforms for interaction between students and companies and organizations to organize project work, thesis work, and matching activities,
5) a revised promotion and reward system for teachers and researchers in order to reward collaborative activities and not only good research and teaching activities. The paper ends with a discussion on how universities can organize better for impact based on the survey results.

Keywords:

University-industry collaboration, impact, research, education.