SSHA-driven Knowledge Transfer within the Third Mission of Universities

Abstract

ledge transfer and to describe themes, formats and programme elements to illustrate the role of SSHA sectors within university outreach actions. KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER-WITH STRINGS ATTACHED FOR SSHA Knowledge transfer is often associated with utilisation of intellectual property, patent-or product-centred technical innovations. The so-called TTOs ("Technology Transfer Officers") are responsible to deliver hard evidence for businesses through lawyers and patent offices. Obviously there are several reasons why the SSHA fields cannot be very interested in participating within such kind of transfer business. It is even hard to say that the social sciences, the humanities and the arts are sharing the same viewpoint and goals within the knowledge transfer setup. For people outside these fields, the acronym SSHA is not even graspable and therefore has to be brought into attention by awareness activities and good practice examples. From a critical point of view, plenty of reasons have been brought into discourse about how and why the transfer of knowledge and the economic trigger behind it will corrode the core values of SSHA (e.g. Castells 1997, Lui 2004, Boltanski / Chiapello 2005). Nevertheless, the goal and motivation to create societal impact through knowledge transfer to communities and peers is seen as an important issue. On the one hand, the judgment is often driven by a strong mistrust (e.g. Raunig 2007) 2 according to the systematic approach to include neoliberal and entrepreneurial elements into the freedom of sciences and arts. On the other hand, social impact and responsible innovations are identified as core drivers and motivations to contribute academic knowledge and research skills to a broader field of application within society. Still, we see problems on an individual level of precarity and stagnation arising, which have to deal with fundamental issues like "make a living" or feeling valuated for the work done, because academic assessment structures are not aligned to mark and qualify these actions. The claim is: Valuation processes in the SSHA with societal impact are developed; they "just" have to be applied in existing structures of knowledge trans-1 See also: http://www.wtz-ost.at (last accessed: 14.11.2018) 2 Creative Industries as Mass Deception, G. Raunig. See also:

Spread and conditions of Social Innovation Research in Austria in the field of Social Sciences

“…3) While technological (commercial) innovation is recognised as a potential income source for universities, and thus facilitated by institutionalised support structures such as technology transfer centres, there are only exceptionally material and immaterial professional university structures available for supporting social innovations. Examples are the '6I research model' at the University of Deusto (Caro-Gonzalez, 2019), the "Tellus Innovation Arena" and the "Oulu Think Tank of Science and Society" at the University of Oulu (Tuunainen et al, 2019) or the Knowledge Transfer Centre for SSH in Austria (Russegger, 2019). 4) Social innovations do not count for the performance accountability of universities and their faculty.…”