This paper examines the drivers for knowledge exchange in British research-intensive universities, at a time when research impact is coming to be seen as an increasingly important outcome of research in all disciplines. It provides evidence of an over-emphasis of the economic benefits of knowledge exchange in the policy sphere and of a quite different value system amongst academics. Academics' commitments having been described as occupying a single bounded space, this enhanced understanding of the motivations and needs of academics as they engage in knowledge exchange points to a new way of approaching the facilitation and promotion of knowledge exchange activity.