In recent years, the coming of the entrepreneurial university has brought about a third role in academia, which involves greater visible exchange of academics with society and industry. In this paper, the authors investigate to what extent individual and organisational factors influence the propensity of academics to engage in different types of Third Mission (TM) activities. This study is based on a large-scale survey of academics in Iceland regarding engagement in socio-economic activities. The results indicate that “soft” activities such as community activities and external teaching and training can be better predicted by individual factors, while hard activities such as applied contract research and commercialisation can be better predicted by organisational factors. Overall, academics are most likely to participate in community-related activities. Hereby, academics from the STEM and health disciplines, with work experience outside of academia and who are open to new experiences are more likely to be engaged in applied contract research and commercialisation. Academics belonging to disciplines other than STEM and health sciences and those that on an average publish more peer-reviewed articles are more likely to disseminate their knowledge to a wider audience outside of academia through public science communication. Gender, rank, and teaching do not affect TM participation, but openness, performance, or discipline do.
This article presents findings on factors hindering academic employees from becoming involved in collaboration activities. Based on survey data, we map out perceived barriers to collaboration whereby five categories emerge: teaching obligations, partner (dis)interest, partners’ resources, academic freedom, and university resources. By means of multiple regression analysis, we examine the extent to which individual, intra-, and inter-organisational factors explain these perceived barriers to collaboration. The study was carried out in Iceland, where university objectives are still heavily based on teaching activities, and few entrepreneurial activities take place in academia. Our results reveal that age and academic disciplines play a main role in the perceptions of academics regarding barriers to collaboration, especially when it comes to barriers grounded in teaching obligations or university resources. Most perceived barriers are based on the internal level that is lack of resources on behalf of universities. The study, therefore, provides a new perspective relative to earlier findings that have indicated that barriers to collaboration exist mostly at the individual level. We conclude that academic institutions can play a more prominent role in the activation of third mission activities than they have been doing so far.
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