Abstract:

The recent socio-economic development towards knowledge society sets new requirements for the transfer of results in practice-oriented research. This article presents the Strategy Planner of the project “Strategic Transfer in Occupational Safety and Health“ (StArG) as an IT-Tool for an innovative procedure for strategic transfer of research results. StArG applies this tool in the funding priority “Preventive Occupational Safety and Health” (PAGS) of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The functionality of this Strategy Planner is explained from a transfer-theoretical point of view. By interactively integrating the transfer partner, the Strategy Planner fosters target-group-adapted and sustainable transfer. Finally, opportunities and limits of its application are discussed.

1 .THE DIFFICULTY OF SUCCESFUL TRANSFER
The transfer of research results and innovation-fostering solutions from research to entrepreneurial practice still reveals a large potential for improvement in the field of PAGS. Reasons for this are assumed to be rooted in the increasing complexity of societal knowledge. This leads to new challenges for research transfer. The selection of adequate transfer instruments becomes a crucial question.

2. THE NECESSITY OF STRATEGIC TRANSFER PLANNING
First, we will introduce the strategic procedure for transfer planning of the StArG project for the funding priority PAGS. The theoretical basis is provided by models of knowledge transfer and customer integration, which highlight the importance of direct interaction. Subsequently, the StArG Strategy Planner is presented as the central IT-Tool of the procedure: It consists of a) a questionnaire with checkboxes, that captures the framework conditions of both transfer partners, and b) a rating matrix that facilitates making statements about the suitability of certain methods under any given context factors. The special accomplishment of the Strategy Planner is in the identification of suitable transfer methods by considering all relevant context factors – both, on the side of the transfer initiator and on the recipient’s side. The underlying logic of the Strategy Planner assumes that according to the impression of certain context factors certain transfer instruments are more or less suitable. For the first time, the Strategy Planner allows to quantify this “more-or-less” exactly.

3. SUCCESS THROUGH TARGET GROUP ORIENTED MEASURE SETS
The Strategy Planner is employed in transdisciplinary Workshops, to derive suitable transfer methods from an extensive analysis of the mutual framework conditions. Indeed, contrary to traditional ideas, knowledge transfer must always be modeled within its whole pragmatic context. It is this 360°-view of the transfer situation, that allows for well-founded statements about the probability of success of transfer methods in the first place. In most cases, transfer is not realized by only one isolated transfer instrument, instead, often an efficient media-mix is called for. The experts of project StArG are advising, on how to compose the selected instruments into effective Measure Sets.

4. DISCUSSION
Finally, the scope of the Strategy Planner is defined and its transferability to other contexts is discussed: the underlying logic of determining the most suitable solution on the basis of the given context factors can easily be customized to other fields like e,g, planning measures to foster entrepreneurial innovative capability.