Transfer scouts: from intermediation to co-constructors of new knowledge and technologies in Germany

Abstract

Abstract The increasing relevance of scientific knowledge for production and innovation requires new instruments for establishing closer relationships between academia and industry. In order to strengthen such relationships, higher education institutes (HEIs), including universities, have institutionalized intermediary organizations such as technology transfer offices (TTOs). It is only recently that research on these organizations has extended its focus from analyzing their functions and performance to the internal processes and practices of their work. Based on qualitative data derived from a process-related focused ethnography, this paper presents insights into the practices of a group of “transfer scouts”. Their distinctive feature is that they are deployed explicitly on the basis of their own scientific and engineering expertise to intensify the university-industry linkages in an East German region. Apart from mere mediation, these transfer scouts become co-creators of new knowledge and technologies in transfer processes. Their orientation towards science, their thematic specialization, their development of digital transfer instruments, their explicit intention to contribute to regional development, as well as their cross-institutional acting keeps them involved in co-creational and multidirectional knowledge-production and makes them active participants in those processes. For transfer intermediaries, these insights offer an extension of their identity as brokering actors between the academic and the business sectors. Since diverse actors operate in the regional transfer system and confront transfer scouts with tensions between cooperation and competition, negotiation processes can be fiercely contested, met by resistance, and accompanied by conflicts. With regard to complementary practices, as well as in the case of constructive relationships, a durable cooperation between TTOs and transfer scouts promises to generate potentially innovative impulses. But this is less a stable setting than an ongoing process that requires many additional functional competencies and supporting structures to be provided by the organizations. The question arises, whether such complex KTT structures can be successfully institutionalized outside the frame of a fixed term project. Only then is it possible to create realistic expectations towards KTT-intermediaries and establish transfer scouting as an attractive profession in its own right in the entrepreneurial university.