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Argentinean universities has a formal fundraising office (or even seems to do this informally) to generate endowments. Thenumbers referring to financing are somewhat problematic. Some of the centers do not have the data readily at hand and nouniversities have research data available in a format that allows them to be linked to specific clusters. They do exist of course,in a fully accurate form, but require a major effort to go to original sources, project by project.The other problem is the lack of standardization of categories of funding, such as endowments, and the difficulty in breakingapart long-term infrastructure grants from specific project grants. The research component of the scientific knowledge generationrole is fairly well managed at a general university level, but it is more related to bureaucratic control than entrepreneurialexploitation of knowledge generation instances.Universities are deeply involved in solving technical issues for resource clusters by consulting and lab services. Nearly allfaculties are active in consulting; the number of consulting projects carried out by faculty is high. There are formal universityconsulting organizations since professors can not consult by law. The consulting activities are managed to only a minimalextent and the definitions of what is consulting and what is research are not always clear or consistent. It seem the EngineeringFaculty at San Juan, and the Agricultural Faculty at Cuyo make the most effort to track this function. There are data oncontracts carried out by all research centers and labs, but they are not in an accessible form that is useful for analysis ormanagement. There are data gathered on individual faculty consulting giving the co-operative system implemented.Laboratories are very involved with quality control and production analysis in Argentina. Again, the data are not reliable, becauseof the very different ways labs define contract units, but interviews showed this is a critical source of revenue for Argentineanuniversities. Laboratories in both Universidad de Cuyo and Universidad de San Juan manage contracts not only for local firmsbut also for firms outside the cluster.The interviews show that universities make important efforts to promote their research capabilities to the cluster throughconsulting contracts. There are formal R&D Extension offices. We see from the data that most universities have promotional orinformative magazines, but almost none of them relate knowledge infrastructure and staff to the cluster. Most of these mechanismsare for the general public, alumni and for researchers themselves. Overall, the universities and the institutes themselves trysolving technical issues for cluster organizations but, given the economic instability existing in Argentina, there are not manyinstances to perform long-term strategic planning of the development of capabilities competitive in the global arena.Students are a critical linking mechanism. There are important numbers of students who are placed in work term jobs throughcoop programs. Both Universidad de Cuyo and Universidad de San Juan have in their programs internships in the cluster for year3 and 4, and its final thesis has to be based on a six-months internship at the end of year 5. Numbers for graduate placementare less reliable, but still reasonable. No data are kept to show if non-core graduates enter the cluster and no databases aresufficiently detailed to show in which part of the cluster (or even in which cluster) the alumni are employed. Trades and technicaleducation is closely linked to university education. Two Argentinean schools are integrating forcefully into technician training.There is little movement of faculty between the university and the cluster in terms of employment. Mechanisms to place facultyin cluster organizations in a kind of sabbatical arrangement do not exist or are not used at all. In mining and wine, we note somemovement out of the university, and it was noted that most of the faculty had left a decade or so ago. This happens because thesalary differential between university and industry is so great and there are periods of boom when there is great demand forpersonnel from industry. Argentinean universities show somewhat more movement from industry to university, which is significantin mining. However, in Argentina, so many part time faculty means there is very high interlinkage with industry. Many of thesefaculties were employees, some are full time teachers, split among different universities, but a significant number are in otherparts of the cluster. It was difficult to distinguish if a faculty member was an industry professional or the people were mostlyindustry professionals who had part time teaching. This has great strength for knowledge transfer in and out of the university, buta weakness in that it almost never relates to research. Mining and wine show a significant linkage with industry in researchthrough co-authored papers, and in teaching, through invited industry lecturers.Conclusions and ImplicationsThe set of indicators seems to cover all the aspects of the linkages, except for the following, which should be added: curriculumdesign; identifying students who are part of the “general public” doing this for personal interest versus students who are doingprofessional training on a part time basis.Measurement indicators should be collected over a 3 year period for research purposes or 1 for annual indexing due to importantannual fluctuations.Lack of standardization of definitions makes some measurements problematic like defining university functions. Most administrativeoffices have multiple functions (eg research management and research extension and technology transfer), so it is sometimesdifficult to measure the number of staff relevant to each management indicator. There are no data kept by any university onconsulting. All numbers reported in this research are very rough estimates. Courses can vary from full semester and focusedentirely on the cluster topic, to an optional, very short workshop or seminar. If one has access to the course content, areasonable judgment can be made on inclusion, but obtaining and evaluating it is time consuming.There is a significant degree of judgement required to measure some indicators. Faculty involvement and research outputs areMadrid, October 20, 21 & 22 - 2010186