TECHNIS Webinar by Pr. Matthias Geissler

Please join us for a webinar tomorrow, on Tuesday the 21st of March 2017 @ 11:00 GMT (i.e. 13:00 Athens time, 12:00 Amsterdam time). 

The speaker is Professor Matthias Geissler, Technische Universität Dresden. The title of the talk is “Alumni as strategic university resource for innovativeness and competitiveness? Insights from a structured literature review on university and firm Alumni”. 

ABSTRACT: Universities have a relatively large number of Alumni (understood as successful graduates or former employees). Reputation effects or imprinting (Higgins, 2005) may allow universities to activate monetary backflows (donations) from Alumni (Weerts, Cabrera, & Sanford, 2010). This is especially true for large and reputed, Anglo-American universities, where fundraising among Alumni has a long tradition. Outside the US and the UK and donations are rather modest and Alumni management is under-developed (Ebert, Axelsson & Harbor, 2015). Moreover, literature on former employees in firms shows that those can act as strategic resource for organizations (Somaya & Williamson, 2008) beyond the provision of funds. With an increased focus on the “third mission” of universities and a trend to open up towards society, there is a rising interest of scholars and practitioners to further activate resources, especially with the aim to access knowledge and influence. Drawing together insights from literature on Alumni-university interactions and post-employment relationships in firms, the purpose of this study is an overview on developed and less-developed functions in which Alumni can benefit their Alma Mater. We conduct a structured literature review in 16 peer reviewed journals in the fields of higher education, technology transfer, management and entrepreneurship research, which yielded 88 relevant articles. We cluster the research topics along the lines of monetary and non-monetary contributions of Alumni/former employees to highlight under-developed functions in which Alumni might be activated as beneficiaries for their Alma Mater. Particularly, we stress the potential knowledge backflows from one of the universities’ biggest stakeholder group as a promising area for fostering knowledge and technology transfer.