Title: Best Knowledge Transfer methodologies for a better Knowledge Triangle.

Tempus IV objective: Higher education and society

Coordinator: UPIN- University of Porto Innovation / http://upin.up.pt

Contact name: Aude Gabrielsen

                               agabrielsen@reit.up.pt

                               Tel: +351 22 040 82 11

Summary of the project:

Due to increasing budgetary harshness of public funding, universities and other public research institutions are expected to transfer more efficiently and rapidly the know–how they generate into commercial activities, through patenting, licensing, research joint ventures and the creation of spin-off companies. This led to a change in the institutional environment and set the ground for the development of public policies specially aimed to encourage the creation of intermediary structures like the Knowledge Transfer Offices (KTOs). In order to improve the Knowledge Transfer (KT) capacity of the partner countries, this TEMPUS IV project aims at defining a set of common KT methodologies to be implemented in the KTOs of the project partnership.

In order to achieve this objective, partner KTOs from EU Member States higher education institutions will share their practices in the 3 main KT areas, namely technology licensing, spin-off creation and entrepreneurship, and university-industry relations. This collection and sharing of practices will lead to the selection of the best practices, through a benchmarking assessment. Once the best practices are selected, they will be implemented in each partner KTO of the participating partner countries, with the support of the EU partner KTOs.

In parallel, national and/or regional authorities will be involved in the project so that innovation strategies and best policies can be applied/adapted in the project partner countries for an effective innovation policies design.