Abstract:

In the present environment, the university-society relationship is the main element linked to its relevance, understood as the impact they have on the context where they operate, and also, this link should lead to synergies with the other two processes that make up university management, the research and teaching process. However, its effectiveness, as a dynamizer of local development and an input to provoke improvements in the process, especially resulting in incremental breaks for the benefit of the teaching-learning process, has not yet reached the desired levels. In this sense, the objective of the work was to diagnose the current situation with reference to the subject, taking as a case study the analysis of the process of linkage in the Cuenca branch of the Salesian Polytechnic University, Ecuador (UPS), in order to contribute to decision-making for the improvement of the university's relevance indexes. For this, a mixed type of research was applied, through the use of focus groups with those involved in the process and the review and analysis of the projects implemented during the period 2017-2021. The results showed that there is dispersion of the objectives of the linkage projects, which puts at risk the scope of the desired impact; the response to the needs of the environment is weak, since these are not verified and systematized, the link with the research processes is insufficient, so synergies between these processes that contribute to proposals for improvements for the innovation of the training process of students are not provoked.

Keywords:

Relevance, university-society linkage.