External curricular knowledge transfer: potential, tensions and conditions for sustainable university knowledge transfer

Universities increasingly mobilise knowledge through curricular activities that connect students and academics with external actors, yet these interactions remain fragmented across teaching, engagement and transfer systems. This conceptual analysis proposes External Curricular Knowledge Transfer (ECKT) as an analytical construct for identifying formal curricular interactions in which academically grounded knowledge, methods or capabilities are transferred, adapted or co-created with external actors and directed towards meaningful external use. Human capillarity describes ECKT's reach, distribution, diversity and bridging capacity, while Sustainable Knowledge Transfer Capacity (SKTC) concerns the institutional capacity to regenerate productive university–society knowledge relationships. Six tensions condition whether recurrent ECKT contributes to SKTC: regeneration–discontinuity, capillarity–quality dilution, appropriation–burden, diversification–inequality, reciprocity–extraction and institutionalisation–performativity. The framework also examines AI-mediated ECKT, proposes preliminary empirical indicators and introduces a Curricular Transfer Experience Repository to preserve relational memory without reducing transfer to activity counts.