Exploratory textual network for Italian Third Mission.

In 2012, the Third Mission (TM) was introduced in the Italian university system such as institutional mission alongside the traditional missions of teaching and research. During 2013, the Minister of Education identified and proposed indicators and parameters aimed at periodic evaluation of the TM. In spite of the apparent simplicity of the TM definition, its declination and evaluation still raise many questions. The TM evaluation framework saw a series of trials which lead to a wide standardisation in the philosophy, methodologies and indicators, by defining an inappropriate model to establish the systematic comparisons between universities. The aim of this paper is to analyse the TM with a focus on the role of the universities to enhance the knowledge transfer in the socio-cultural and economic territorial environment. More precisely, by an exploratory textual network approach, we analysed the universities’ strategic plans drafted from 2015 to 2022 for discovering how the TM has been depicted and incorporated in universities culture. We studied the importance attributed to the term “impact” in the definition of the strategic lines aimed at defining the TM. Our innovation in this contribution does not reside in the integration of textual analysis and Social Network Analysis but, in its conjoint application to the context of the TM, such as a constantly evolving socio-cultural and regulatory domain. The results of exploratory analysis suggest that currently, there is a mismatch between the evolving theoretical framework and the practice of academic activities drafted in the strategic plans. Thus, it results necessary the definition of other criteria to develop or improve the importance of the socio-economic repercussions deriving from the strategic lines in the Italian universities.