Understanding Third Mission Activities as Services to Cooperatively Design the Non-Academic Environment

The UNESCO World Action Program on ESD assumes that universities bear social responsibility by generating and transferring knowledge and innovations (BMBF 2022) to their non-academic environment. Those activities are often referred to as Third Mission Activities (TMA) besides the two initial university missions research and education. In this paper it is investigated whether considering TMA as “services offered by universities” is an adequate option for the analysis and management of those activities. In problem-centered interviews conducted between 2019 and 2020, 127 university members at three German universities presented detailed information about various TMA, which was examined in a qualitative content analysis. In this investigation, properties of classic and complex service types were compared to the characteristics of the TMA by deductive category formation. Inductive category formation additionally enabled a more detailed analysis of knowledge-intensive and cooperative service sub-types. As a result, it can be shown that classic, complex, knowledge-intensive and cooperative service types exhibit strong parallels with TMA