While public research organisations (PROs) are increasingly expected to actively transfer knowledge to business, government and wider society, limited research exists about how they manage this important function. Particularly, we do not know under what conditions it is more effective for PRO to vertically integrate knowledge transfer management, or to outsource it to specialist providers. Extending the theory of firm boundaries to PROs, we argue that this choice is influenced by two types of complementarity between research and knowledge transfer: intrinsic complementarity (occurring when the knowledge transfer process requires unique tacit knowledge) and strategic complementarity (occurring when the nature of the knowledge recipients matters to the PRO). By exploiting a unique six-year panel dataset of 33 PROs in the United Kingdom, we confirm that higher degrees of both types of complementarity are associated with greater likelihood to vertically integrate knowledge transfer management, and that these effects are independent of economies of scale and sector specificities.
While public research organisations (PROs) are increasingly expected to transfer knowledge to businesses and other stakeholders, their engagement in knowledge transfer (KT) activities is still under-researched. Better understanding of PROs’ KT engagement, including how it is shaped by PROs’ organisational characteristics, could lead to better tailored policies in support to PROs’ effort to transfer knowledge. We develop a conceptual framework linking PROs’ specialisation in different fields of knowledge to their profiles of KT engagement and validate it empirically using a six-year panel data set of 33 PROs in the UK. We use multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis techniques to identify three distinct KT profiles, which are stable over time, and strongly associated with the PROs’ knowledge field specialisation. We argue that these profiles may depend on the different market readiness and user specificity of knowledge outputs arising from different fields of knowledge and derive implications for theory, policy, and practice.
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