Transfer for Sustainable Development at Higher Education Institutions—Untapped Potential for Education for Sustainable Development and for Societal Transformation

Abstract

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly confronted with societal needs beyond research and teaching. These include sustainable development and technology transfer as well as the practical application of knowledge and ideas. Several HEIs already put sustainable development and transfer into practice. These practitioner-university partnerships comprise a broad range of actors, disciplines, topics, and formats. However, transfer activities that contribute to sustainable development in society still make up only a very small part of HEIs' activities. In response to calls from society as a whole, HEIs could combine transfer and sustainable development more systematically. In this article, we suggest a concept of transfer for sustainable development. The focus is on sustainability transfer in teaching. We used mixed methods for this conceptual work: exploratory workshops, expert interviews, and a case study of transfer in teaching. One of the results presented in this article is a working definition of sustainability transfer at HEIs. In addition, six characteristics for describing sustainability transfer in its various forms are formulated. This conceptualization makes it possible to analyze the diversity of HEIs' sustainability transfer activities, it helps to identify and encourage potential transfer actors at HEIs as well as practitioners, and, thus, tap the full potential of sustainability transfer.

University 4.0: Promoting the Transformation of Higher Education Institutions toward Sustainable Development

“…The map is currently being reprogrammed to include a novel search and database feature, enabling users to display, for example, all best-practices dealing with education for SD or SD governance (see [90] for the URL). As HOCH-N was not only set up as a network but also as a research alliance, the project has also produced substantial results in six different fields of action: reporting [91], governance [7,9,92,93], teaching & education [94,95], research [62,96], operations [97,98], and transfer [99,100]. The six corresponding work packages have published practitioner's guides (see references above), available free of charge as print versions and PDFs (currently, only the guide on sustainability governance is available in English).…”

Sustainability Transfer as a Concept for Universities in Regional Transformation—A Case Study

“…Experience shows that sustainability transfer is not only supply-oriented, but also requires a mutual exchange between university and practice due to the mostly very complex content-related and methodical handling of sustainability challenges, which ideally leads to a cooperative implementation of sustainable practical solutions. As the following Figure 2 [17] shows, the likelihood of integration between university and practice also increases with growing intensity of exchange or cooperation. Of course, unidirectional provision of knowledge such as public lectures, exhibitions or practitioners in the lecture hall do have an impact.…”

“…To achieve a common understanding of the transfer activities of HEIs and a conceptualization that supports the operation and implementation specific to sustainable development, we developed further a conceptual understanding of sustainability transfer building on earlier work [17,24]. Yet, there is a methodological challenge in conceptu-alizing and analyzing practitioner-university relationships.…”

“…This has consequences for the characteristics of sustainability transfer that are displayed hereinafter. As sustainability transfer is substantively linked to teaching and research activities, we assume that sustainability transfer in teaching is especially appropriate, in order to involve local and regional stakeholders in transdisciplinary projects and discussions and to improve key competencies for sustainable development [17]. Several case studies point to an enormous potential for concrete, low-threshold contributions to regional sustainability with students as transfer actors [26][27][28].…”

“…However, concepts for such interaction are either rather general and fuzzy or very specific (e.g., restricted to mere technology transfer from engineering development to production in business); there is a gap between theory and practice that may arise as a result of conceptual ambiguity, hindering strategic alignment, and the applicability of results to a solution [7,8]. This gap is also reflected in the very divergent motives of theoreticians and So far, there are only few scientific concepts and empirical analyses available, which provide guidelines for sustainability transfer in a local and regional context [8,16,17,21]. For this reason, this paper aims to advance the foundations for sustainability transfer activities between universities and practitioners.…”