In the context of growing societal demand and interdependency, universities need to prioritize their 'third mission' activities and balance them against core functions. Individual researchers too are faced with multiple external constituencies and various mechanisms for interaction. The degree, target, and mode of their involvement with societal actors must be considered in light also of high performance expectations concerning traditional teaching and research activities. In this study, we explore patterns of third mission involvement among 652 researchers at the Science and Technology Faculty, Aarhus University from 2009-2012 using register-based data. First, we collect 13 indicators of third mission involvement from the university register system PURE, and find that these can be organised in distinct sets. External interaction and knowledge sharing can take many shapes, but they appear to group together empirically in ways that reflect the external partners and mode of involvement. Second, we determine five clusters of researchers based on their third mission activities. The majority of researchers has limited engagement in any kind of third mission activities, while an almost negligible minority entertain activities across the board. The remaining researchers focus their engagement on one type of third mission activity: public sector service, industrial collaboration, or executive involvement. Finally, we explore the interrelatedness of third mission involvement and research performance. Researchers who work closely with industry perform extremely well in terms of both publication productivity and impact, while those primarily engaged with public authorities perform considerably below average. We contextualise the results and highlight the limitations of the study.

In the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in public private collaboration, which has motivated lengthy discussion of the implications of collaboration in general, and co-authorship in particular, for the scientific impact of research. However, despite this strong interest in the topic, there is little systematic knowledge on the relation between public private collaboration and citation impact. This paper examines the citation impact of papers involving public-private collaboration in comparison with academic research papers. We examine the role of a variety of factors, such as international collaboration, the number of co-authors, academic disciplines, and whether the research is mainly basic or applied. We first examine citation impact for a comprehensive dataset covering all Web of Science journal articles with at least one Danish author in the period 1995-2013. Thereafter, we examine whether citation impact for individual researchers differs when collaborating with industry compared to work only involving academic researchers, by looking at a fixed group of researchers that have both engaged in public-private collaborations and university-only publications. For national collaboration papers, we find no significant difference in citation impact for public-only and public-private collaborations. For international collaboration, we observe much higher citation impact for papers involving public-private collaboration.

In this article, we explore the connectedness of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) profiles and organizational properties of 188 European higher education institutions (HEIs). Empirically we identify three distinct clusters of HEIs in terms of their RRI profile. One cluster is characterized by low RRI uptake, while the other two employ a range of RRI policies and procedures related to gender equality, ethics and public engagement. We find that the RRI active clusters were organizationally very alike, characterized by a rather high degree of research intensity and impact, multi-disciplinary orientation, active participation in Horizon 2020, and by being larger than the RRI passive cluster. We discuss how insights from established theory about change in organizations can be used to explore these similarities and differences.

In the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in public-private collaboration, which has motivated lengthy discussion of the implications of collaboration in general, and co-authorship in particular, for the scientific impact of research. However, despite this strong interest in the topic, there is little systematic knowledge on the relation between public-private collaboration and citation impact. This paper examines the citation impact of papers involving public-private collaboration in comparison with academic research papers. We examine the role of a variety of factors, such as international collaboration, the number of co-authors, academic disciplines, and whether the research is mainly basic or applied. We first examine citation impact for a comprehensive dataset covering all Web of Science journal articles with at least one Danish author in the period 1995–2013. Thereafter, we examine whether citation impact for individual researchers differs when collaborating with industry compared to work only involving academic researchers, by looking at a fixed group of researchers that have both engaged in public-private collaborations and university-only publications. For national collaboration papers, we find no significant difference in citation impact for public-only and public-private collaborations. For international collaboration, we observe much higher citation impact for papers involving public-private collaboration.

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