Intellectual capital reporting and sustainability (project results)

The project "Intellectual capital reporting and sustainability - additional criteria for universities to assess social responsibility towards sustainable development" dealt with the identification of criteria for assessing the contribution of universities to the sustainable development of society. The aim was to make activities that universities carry out for a sustainable development of our society visible and rewardable or eligible for funding. Up-to-date, These activities do not appear in current performance assessments and knowledge balances.

Funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Research, Education and Science, this project was carried out at BOKU with the cooperation of the University of Graz in the period from October 2022 to September 2023.

Through participatory, discursive processes based on literature and web research, the following was developed:

1. Development of a differentiation of different types of sustainability research and teaching (Chapter 3.2. in the final report) in order to highlight transformative research and teaching in particular and make it eligible for funding;
2. Development of a set of criteria (Chapter 3.3. in the final report) to make the framework conditions and structures of universities for the promotion of sustainability-related research and teaching visible;
3. Development of recommendations for action (Chapter 4. in the final report), with the aim of promoting the implementation of the developed criteria and challenging structures of the current science system in order to enable research and teaching that contribute to or actively promote the sustainable development of our society.

The differentiation between different types of sustainability research and teaching as well as the set of criteria and the recommendations for action can be found in detail in the German final report. The (inter)national activities identified for the sustainability and impact assessment of research and teaching, which were also included in our work, can also be found in the interim and final reports linked below.