Two Agreements, One Shared Goal
The first of the agreements was signed by the President of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, and Julián Garde himself, as part of the conference on collaborative university–business governance hosted by the Business Negotiation School. The deal aims to boost the project’s outreach and foster a closer connection between universities and the business community, providing teaching and research staff with a platform to showcase their knowledge transfer projects and facilitate new collaborations.
The second agreement was signed by Garde and José Luis Bonet, President of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce, with the exact same objective: to promote collaboration in knowledge transfer, science, research, and innovation between universities and businesses. The Chamber’s University–Business Commission, coordinated by Antonio Abril, explicitly aims to strengthen knowledge transfer and the commercialisation of university research outputs for practical use across the corporate sector.
A Platform with Over 200 Projects and Three Audiences
The ‘Transfer and Social Impact’ project revolves around a digital platform hosted on the CRUE website, which structures its content around three key audiences: researchers looking to raise the profile of their work, companies seeking applicable knowledge and solutions, and the general public interested in understanding the role of universities beyond teaching.
The cataloging system already features over 200 university projects with commercialization potential, a significant portion of which are backed by intellectual property protection. The platform is supported by a monthly newsletter and a monitoring committee involving key stakeholders across the system.
The European Framework and the Spanish Science Strategy
The agreements come against a favourable regulatory backdrop. The EU Council Recommendation of December 2022 defines knowledge transfer as the process of creating social and economic value from research, while the Spanish Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation identifies it as an essential driver of prosperity and social well-being.
What CRUE’s project adds to this theoretical framework is something far more tangible: the conviction that the issue is neither regulatory nor budgetary, but one of connection. Researchers involved in knowledge transfer activities—according to studies by the Institute of Political and Social Sciences at the University of La Laguna—are willing to commit time and intellectual resources to these pursuits because they enrich their teaching, provide exposure to practical problems, and build technical expertise. The incentive is already there; what has been missing is the structural framework to make it visible and operational.
Compass’s Added Value: A knowledge catalogue is not knowledge transfer—it is only the starting point
Making visible what universities generate is necessary. However, visibility should not be confused with transfer, as they are two distinct issues requiring distinct solutions. A platform with 200 accessible projects addresses the first part of the problem: companies and researchers failing to connect simply because they are unaware of each other’s existence.
What it does not solve is what happens after that initial connection.
Genuine transfer begins precisely where the catalogue ends: when a business decides to invest in a technology as yet unproven in its sector, when a researcher must negotiate a licensing deal without knowing how, or when funding is needed to take a laboratory result to a proof of concept and no suitable financing instrument is available. None of these steps can be resolved by a digital platform, no matter how well designed. They are resolved by intermediaries with technical expertise, funding targeted at the validation phase, and an incentive framework that recognises transfer as a core component of a researcher’s role—rather than a side project pursued by those who happen to have the time. The agreement between CRUE, CEOE, and the Chamber of Commerce is welcome news. The question now is whether it will generate the operational infrastructure that transfer actually requires, or remain merely another well-signed statement of intent.
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