Third mission in online debates

Under the term Third Mission an interesting bundle of sub-concepts about the university’s relationship to its local and regional environment is debated: How are universities integrated in local innovation systems? How do universities recognize local social needs? How do universities contribute to the regional economy? We reconstruct the sub-concepts for knowledge transfer, community engagement and commercialization which appear under umbrella terms like Third Mission or Third Stream in the international online debate of higher education intermediaries. By comparing configurations of sub-concepts in different clusters of intermediaries, we are able to identify current variations of the Third Mission which might be explained by underlying variations of the field of higher education