The Bond Between Higher Education Institutions and Society: A Scoping Review About Knowledge Transfer and Valorisation to Promote Sustainable Development

Introduction

Increasingly, companies around the world have raised concerns about the development of more sustainable practices, either because they believe that they can enable a greener, fairer society in line with the common goals of these and the new generations or because they realise that such promotion enables them to achieve greater visibility and promotion. Nowadays, we are confronted with a promotion that increasingly shows the concern of companies, particularly large companies, for sustainable development (SD), both through campaigns that promote social causes and the presentation and development of more sustainable products, and in the increasing involvement in partnerships, particularly with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) (polytechnics and universities). On the other hand, within the scope of their third mission, HEIs have increasingly participated with their knowledge in developing projects and services with companies. The good performance of HEIs in services and/or projects development can also contribute to higher financial autonomy of HEIs. The income resulting from the transfer of knowledge between HEI and companies/society could help to finance HEI activities (European Commission, 2007).

In recent years, the link between HEIs, their research and development institutes, and companies has been highlighted, enabling knowledge to be transferred for product development and innovation for the companies to stay in business. National and international funding agencies have exploited this still disruptive link to leverage these partnerships. In the European Commission, the new Horizon Europe Programme is increasingly promoting this type of partnership within its typologies. For instance, the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) states in its 2022 call for R&D projects in all scientific domains that:

In this context, it is particularly important to promote and strengthen scientific skills and technological institutions through their teams' participation in projects. The transfer of knowledge between HEIs and society is a growing concern and is even a criterion for assessing the quality of projects subject to funding (e.g., sustainability of European projects), but there is little evidence of how this transfer of knowledge is performed, what is the level of maturity of the HEIs regarding their ability to transfer knowledge and whether it is seen as a strategic concern for the HEI. Additionally, there is an urgent need to know how knowledge transfer and partnerships between HEIs and companies can contribute to SDGs.

Such a research gap led to the following research questions: How have HEIs operationalised knowledge transfer to society in terms of research, development, and innovation (R&D&I)? What are the determinants of this process? How do HEIs transferring knowledge to society contribute to sustainability and United Nations SDGs?

This research has the following goals to answer these questions:

• 1.

  Understand the determinants of HEIs knowledge transfer to society.

• 2.

  Perceive the state of HEIs knowledge transfer to society.

• 3.

  Perceive the impact of HEIs knowledge transfer to society on local and regional development.

• 4.

  Perceive how HEIs knowledge transfer to society supports the implementation of sustainability and the United Nations SDGs.

A scoping review was conducted to answer these research questions and achieve these objectives.

Background

HEIs increasingly promote close articulation with different stakeholders, other universities and polytechnics, and institutions linked to several sectors within the framework of joint project development. For O’Reilly et al. (2019), HEIs have a growing role in supporting innovation and facilitating regional economic development by adding knowledge transfer activities, also called the third mission. Increasingly entities from the business sector are looking to HEIs for partnerships (and vice versa), which enhance the transfer of knowledge between higher education and society.