Supporting technology transfer with communities and social software solutions

In order to bridge the gap between research and industry, promoting technology and knowledge transfer becomes increasingly important. Especially small and mediumsized enterprises, having only little R&D resources themselves, depend on external technology development activities for remaining innovative. Academia research on the other hand needs potential industrial partners, who are capable and willing to commercialize their technologies as most public funding programs require some sort of technology transfer or dissemination activities. Modern web technologies offer more and more "social" functionalities and open up new ways of user interaction. In the past years several technology transfer platforms were developed, making use of modern web technologies in order to enable and support technology transfer. In this paper we report on the results of a stateofthe art analyses of existing technology transfer platforms, point out their advantages and deficits and give a perspective to the development of an improved technology transfer platform.