A New Role for Universities: Technology Transfer for Social Innovations

Universities have played a significant role in stimulating technological change and innovation, the focus has been commercialization of technical knowledge generated within science, technology and mathematics disciplines. Universities have increased disseminating knowledge as well as integration with industry in the form of entrepreneurial university. The transformation of university mission has supported university industry -government interactions in creating commercial entrepreneurial spinoffs while it neglected to interact with a critical stakeholder of the university: society. To our knowledge, the transfer of knowledge generated within universities into social enterprises/social entrepreneurs has not been studied in the literature. This paper will present the gap in the literature review that might be an invitation for researchers to focus on the topic.