The project aimed to enhance the effectiveness and societal impact of KT activities by strengthening the soft skills of KT professionals. Although KT policies and practices increasingly emphasize co-creation and societal engagement, the professional development of KT practitioners has remained largely focused on technical and legal competences. Thus, many KT professionals lack structured support to develop the relational, cognitive, and coordination skills required to establish, manage, and sustain complex partnerships involving HEIs, industry, public bodies, and civil society. To address this gap, the project pursued three goals: (1) identifying and conceptualizing the key soft skills needed for effective KT; (2) developing and validating a self-assessment framework to support KT professionals’ reflection on their skill profiles and training needs; and (3) designing, piloting, and refining a modular soft skills training programme and toolkit adaptable to different organizational contexts and career stages. By integrating skills identification, self-assessment, and training, the project contributes to more interconnected, inclusive, and impact-oriented HEIs in Europe, strengthening the human and relational foundations of KT.
The Soft Skills for Knowledge Transfer project was developed to address a growing and widely recognised gap in the skills of Knowledge Transfer (KT) professionals, who are increasingly required to manage complex collaborations involving higher education institutions (HEIs), businesses, and societal actors. While European policies and funding programmes strongly promote collaboration and co-creation to tackle societal and economic challenges, KT practices and professional training have traditionally focused on technical, legal, and quantitative aspects of knowledge transfer, such as patents, and licences. As a result, many KT professionals lack structured support to develop the soft skills needed to build, manage, and sustain long-term partnerships. These include communication, negotiation, conflict management, and networking across organizational, institutional, and cultural boundaries. The project was designed to respond directly to this gap by shifting attention from output-oriented metrics toward the relational and processual dimensions of KT, thereby strengthening the capacity of KT professionals to act as facilitators and boundary spanners and enhancing the societal impact of knowledge transfer activities across Europe.