Assessing the impact of knowledge transfer policies: an international comparison of models and indicators of universities’ knowledge transfer performance

This chapter discusses how to appropriately measure the effectiveness of knowledge transfer from university to industry. It shows that the assessment systems implemented in several countries (UK, US, Canada, Australia and Europe) adopt rather narrow views of what constitute relevant knowledge transfer activities and their impacts, leading to the selection of partial indicators that might not allow all institutions to represent their knowledge transfer performance accurately. We derive some implications for the measurement of universities’ performance and for the assessment of policies in support of knowledge production and transfer more generally