On November 22 and 23, 2022, a team of professors representing the Universidad del Valle (Colombia) in the “Strengthening the Impact of Latin American Universities IMPALA” project presented the results, opportunities and lessons learned obtained from this project to the managers of the Faculty of Business Administration and the Vice Chancellor’s Office for Extension and Social Projection at the Universidad del Valle.
During these presentations, the relevance of incorporating the measurement of the impact of any activity or project development at the University within the framework of its third mission was highlighted. As cases and good practices, scholars presented two projects to explain the measurement of their impact: the macro-project “Strengthening the competitiveness of speciality coffees in the centre of Valle del Cauca – CAFINNOVA” and the ASES strategy. Both projects were adapted to the IMPALA methodology to contribute to measuring its impact through the Impact assessment framework (IAF). Nineteen higher education institutions from Europe and Latin America built this tool in the project.
As lessons learned, scholars pointed out the challenge of measuring the impact of third mission projects as a long-term process, structuring the projects and processes of the third mission to measure impact from its conception, and the need to develop information systems to accompany the impact measurement.
