ABSTRACT
Three questions Why do universities transfer technology? Is not technology transfer a business far removed from traditional academic missions of education and research? Nevertheless, how did interface between academia and industry become an academic pursuit, despite divergent institutional logics? Evolving from an informal professorial avocation to a professional administrative office and from a legal to marketing to an entrepreneurial approach, technology transfer has spread across academia. As the transfer of technology has shifted from marginal to mainstream, a host of questions have been raised over the purpose of the university, the nature of knowledge and the role of the university in society. Serendipitous discoveries, whose beneficial consequences also subjected the university and populace to risk, drove the initial direction of policy discourse.
