The Disclosure of University Research forSocietal Demand. A non-marketperspective on the Third Mission

Since the introduction in 1998, by the UK government, of wealth creation as a “third mission” for universities in addition to teaching and research, many nations are committing resources to promote the dissemination of knowledge and the relationship between science and society. However, the emphasis on knowledge-based innovation has featured the economic function of the university, for example, in terms of technology transfer offices, intellectual property, “valorization” programs, university-industry-government relations, etc. Most case-study research on this issue focuses on “best” practices of technology transfer and institutional arrangements among universities, industries, and government. Before one focuses on success stories of “building bridges,” in our opinion, the rich varieties on both benches of the river could be made visible so that more options for relating demand and supply in innovations can be explored. We elaborated on an idea that was originally developed in the context of the Dutch science shops in the late 1980s when the two Amsterdam universities were questionnaired about keywords and expertise at the level of individual researchers. Uisng the internet, this original experimentation was redesigned for questionnairing the academic staff of Gabriele d’Annunzio University (UdA) in the Abruzzi Region in Italy (728 tenured staff). We report about the results on the supply side. In a next stage the project will be complemented with an analysis on the demand side and using semantic maps and thesauri, bridges can be constructed representing both best prctices and best possible practices, and with considerable semantic precision