Today’s universities are expected to simultaneously conduct teaching, research and third stream activities. These latter activities are usually materialized in the form of technology transfer activities. In a context were researchers are expected to simultaneously excel in all the tasks they perform, the scheme of incentives for the academic community is crucial. This study seeks to investigate and generate a new debate on in which activities are researchers devoting their efforts and time. In order to do so, we describe the evolution of research (publications) and technology transfer (R&D contracts and funded projects) outputs in the four technical universities of Spain. Results reveal that while revenues coming from R&D activities have notoriously diminished in the last years, the number of scientific publications has increased. These findings lead us to question whether Spanish universities are not properly aligned with industry needs, thus contradicting their raison d’être.