Indicators of university-industry knowledge transfer performance and their implications for universities: Evidence from the UK’s HE-BCI survey

Focusing on the measurement of universities’ performance in knowledge transfer, we outline some critical issues connected with the choice of appropriate indicators: in particular, we argue that, in order to allow universities to correctly represent their knowledge transfer performance, indicators should include a variety of knowledge transfer activities, reflect a variety of impacts, allow comparability between institutions, and avoid the creation of perverse behavioural incentives. To illustrate these issues empirically, we discuss the case of the United Kingdom’s Higher Education –Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) survey. We show that the indicators used to measure and reward univ ersities’ engagement in knowledge transfer are not fully comprehensive, they are better suited to capture the impact of certain types of activities than othersand they are influenced by institutional strategies and characteristics rather than simply reflecting different performances. The conclusions explore some promising directions to address some of these problem