Moving beyond traditional measures – lessons from evaluating collaborative initiatives at Lund University

Over the last decade, universities and other institutions of higher education (HEIs) worldwide have witnessed an evolution to their role relative to society – with increasing attention to external engagement and expectations on societal impact. This has fostered an upswing in activity as research and innovation funding bodies and universities alike explore new approaches to working with external engagement, and led to questions regarding how to evaluate the societal impact of these efforts. Although there are examples of national frameworks to evaluate research impact, the large majority of countries and HEIs around the world are still experimenting with approaches to evidence and assess their pathway to societal impact. This paper aims to contribute to evolving practice in this field by presenting lessons from the evaluation of a new strategic instrument (thematic collaboration initiatives) at Lund University (LU), Sweden.
The evaluation of the strategic instrument “thematic collaboration initiatives” encompassed both initiative/ operational and LU leadership/strategic levels. The approach to the evaluation combined traditional measures and processes, together with new indicators and evaluation approaches. The evaluation has resulted in a better understanding of the range of activities and outputs that one can expect from such collaborative initiatives – informing the selection of measures to include in evaluation efforts. The evaluation also provided new insights on how universities can work with and use evaluation to guide the further development of the university’s approach to fostering external engagement. Participatory processes and facilitated reflection were very beneficial to draw out multiple perspectives and possible implications for future development of the instrument.