Brokering knowledge, monitoring compliance: technology transfer professionals on the boundary between academy and industry

This paper contributes to discussions about the processes and implications of technology transfer through analysis of the work of technology transfer professionals. The analysis relies on interviews with technology transfer professionals in Israeli universities, coupled with theory from the domains of knowledge brokering, boundary work, and the institutional work approach in new institutional theory. I argue that these professionals undertake two types of boundary work. The first is brokering work, in which they connect academic researchers with industrial partners and translate knowledge across boundaries. The second is maintenance work, a type of institutional work that involves policing and monitoring, to protect the university’s ownership of intellectual property and the normative boundaries of academic science. I reveal the strategies that professionals employ to manage conflicts of interest and of values as part of their ongoing work, and discuss the implications for technology transfer policy and the normative aspect of university-industry relations.