VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

Drawing on literature pertaining management (Drucker, 1954; Zamagni et al., 2015) and higher education studies, the paper presents how universities can benefit from impact evaluation as a tool for organizational learning and reflexivity, co-designing, enhancing and exploiting the transformative potential of Third Mission initiatives (Venturi, 2019; De Maria, 2025). A proper evaluation design of Third Mission impact can strengthen consistency between institutional strategies and internal academic activities (Agrimi & Guaragno, 2023), synergies between teaching, research and Third Mission (Vischi, 2018) as well as alignment between internal academic activities and needs of external stakeholders, or changes occurring within their contexts, thus following the paradigm of civic university (Goddard et al., 2016). The benefit is not limited to continuous improvement of Third Mission initiatives, instead it is extended at a systemic level to all academic actors and activities, due to new information, knowledge and awareness exchanged between researchers and stakeholders through Third Mission, possibly leading to the innovation of teaching and research. The participatory nature of impact evaluation involves external stakeholders in projecting and generating impacts that respond to current priorities and critical issues; those stakeholders who already conduct impact evaluation in their workplace can also help to tailor sustainable evaluation practices, developing evaluation capacity building in faculty members (Campagna, 2024). The paper aims to show how the phases of the impact value chain, placed in the theoretical framework of Theory of Change, can promote a beneficial and effective contribution of universities on the contemporary scene, reinforcing their role as anchor institutions.