Innovative knowledge transfer models to enhance the impacts of university outputs

The relation between innovation and productivity/economic growth is well established; It is found that (innovation) patents faster total factor productivity growth, and this relation is stronger in countries where patents are widely held by small private firms. Innovation has been a major engine for food system transformation and will be critical to address the needs of a rapidly growing population in a context of climate change and natural resource scarcity (FAO-HLPE, 2017). Universities and other research institutions are the main source of innovations. They are producing knowledge, new ideas, discoveries and inventions, which will transform into innovations. Universities are also tempted by business incubation and technology commercialization to boost innovation and entrepreneurship. The fit between innovation at early stages up to the field is measured by the andldquo;technology readiness levelsandrdquo; (TRL) which turned out into an operational methodology defining the general features of the process of technology transfer (the TRL was adopted in H2020 program of EU). While the TRL is innovative as an operational methodology, the process of TT also needs innovation. The SQU has a highly recognized record of research in the fields of resources, agriculture and food. These outputs are expected to lead to innovations that would help transforming the agriculture and food systems. These expected impacts are neither well documented nor actually measured (in terms of productivity growth and competitiveness). Recent research has been patented. Novel process for date syrup has been developed (AL-Habsi and Rahman, 2017) which could be used by the date processing industry to produce new product as date-set-syrup. Other promising research on food functionalities derived from seaweeds is published and waiting patenting and adoption (Al-Alawi et al. 2016; Way et al., 2016). The degree of adoption of these research outputs is associated to missing linkages that need to be re-established in order to enhance research-innovation impacts. In particular, this is fixed by setting up a process of research innovation for the (selected) research deliverables. Researchers as well as industry and government executives complaint that research findings and technological innovations in the field of agriculture and food are faced with some resistance on the part of the communities intended to benefit from these new ideas and technologies. The literature is rife with examples explaining this resistance by recourse to predetermined ethnocentric conclusions and value-judgments. The failure of solutions based on such an elitist conception of social reality has been severely criticized by sociologists. Alternatively, they called for a radical change of approach based on the need to understand social actions such as resistance to change from the point of view of the actors themselves. This project endeavors to document and assess selected research/ inventions/patents in the fields of agriculture, resources and food with a focus on functional foods and develop a comprehensive model of innovation transfer based on innovation theory and socio-institutional dimensions, for specific functional foods of great potential for business creation and development.