IncubatecUFRO was recognized as the best in Chile, regarding the sales of its portfolio of entrepreneurs in 2017.

You can find the best business incubator in Chile in the Araucanía Region and it is called IncubatecUFRO. It was recognized by the Production Development Corporation (CORFO), which awarded the incubator and accelerator of the Universidad de La Frontera for being the best in Chile, regarding the sales of its portfolio of entrepreneurs in 2017.

During that year, the portfolio of companies supported by IncubatecUFRO reached a sales total of about 7800 million Chilean pesos, what is above the rest of incubators and accelerators across the country.

“In an ecosystem of entrepreneurship that is growing each day, this acknowledgement is a confirmation of the confidence the different entrepreneurs put into IncubatecUFRO and of the work we have done together in order to make their projects come true and install them as innovative and transforming solutions in Chile and the world,” Claudine Uribe, executive director of IncubatecUFRO, commented.

“This award, given by CORFO, is the result of the work we have been doing with the entrepreneurs in this region and the rest of Chile during the last 17 years, which we are very proud of,” Gerardo Lagos, the Innovation Manager of IncubatecUFRO, added.

IncubatecUFRO was also recognized at the World Incubation Summit of UBI Global, this year, as the eighth best incubator worldwide and the best in Latin America in the category World Top Business Accelerator – Linked to University.

Written by: Dirección de Comunicaciones
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The THE Rankings 2019 report places the UFRO in seventh place in Chile and in first place among regional state universities.

The level of quality at the Universidad de La Frontera has been acknowledged again in the latest edition of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019, in which the UFRO is in seventh place among the Chilean universities in general and in first place among the Chilean regional state universities. In the Latin-American context, it is placed in the range 61-70.

This ranking is one of the most prestigious ones, and for its report 2019, Times Higher Education judged more than 1200 research-intensive universities across all of their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. Therefore, they use 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons.

In the general ranking, the UFRO is placed in the range 801-1000, the same one than in 2017. Regarding the details, our institution climbed up in almost all items, with an important increase in Research and Citation Impact, while another one of the best valued fields was International Outlook, in which it classified in the fifth decile.
Regarding the item Teaching, you can observe a decrease of almost two points, what could mainly be explained by the results of the annual reputation survey conducted among a group of academics who are participating in the ranking.

INSTITUTIONAL COMMITTEE

With the aim of a better positioning of the Universidad de La Frontera in these external measurements, the university is planning a committee whose main role would be the analysis of new institutional strategies for impacting in the quality ranking.

The idea of this committee, which will consist of UFRO academics and professionals, will focus on finding new ways of addressing these rankings. Therefore, they will specialize on understanding the methods of measuring the objective and perceived (reputation) university quality, in order to choose a comprehensive institutional strategy, which would start in 2019 in order to see its impacts in two to six years from now.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE RANKINGS

Fourteen higher education institutions, united under the sectorial brand Learn Chile, participated at the EAIE 2018 Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in order to strengthen its links with the main continent from which the exchange students in Chile come from. The UFRO was one of them, with the participation of the International Affairs Office´s director, Dr. Pamela Leal.

Geneva, Switzerland. Hundreds of work meetings, new international cooperation agreements, an excellent visibility and the positioning of the academic offer in Chile – this is what these 14 higher education institutions, who were present at the European Association for International Education (EAIE) Conference 2018, achieved. At this event, 5500 experts and educators of 85 countries came together in order to get to know the latest tendencies in higher education and to activate new cooperation networks that will pave the way for student exchange and academic cooperation during the next years.

The delegation, which presented itself as one whole country, strengthened the position of Chile as an important player in the field of international education in Latin America, with an emphasis on Chile´s leadership in the areas safety, life quality, connectivity and institutional responsibility. Working together with ProChile´s support through the sectorial brand Learn Chile, which brings a total of 24 higher education institutions throughout the country together, the exhibition was an opportunity to reinforce mechanisms for student mobility and the development of inter-university cooperation projects that will benefit Chilean and foreign students.

In addition to the signed agreements for each participating institution, the network Learn Chile established an ambitious work plan with the university network University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific (UMAP), with which Chilean students will be able to opt for different types of student mobility support and funds for countries in Asia and the Pacific. At the same time, the strategic alliance with the Colombian Network for the Internationalization of Higher Education, an organization that brings more than a hundred higher education institutions in Colombia together, was strengthened and they agreed to do a networking meeting with Learn Chile in Medellin, Colombia, in November of this year.

In times of political unrest and quick changes in the international scene, the conference included a series of lectures and spaces of conversation that reveal the importance of international education as a bridge for dialogue between different countries. Under the motto “Facing Outward”, this version of the EAIE conference encouraged the participants to seek for a better understanding and cooperation regarding points of view other than your own.

At the end of the event, the sectorial brand Learn Chile confirmed its participation at the Conference in 2019, which will take part in Helsinki, Finland.

Source: Learn Chile

The creation of an international research institute and the progress in consolidating the double graduation are part of the projections of joint work with KU Leuven.

The delegation of authorities from KU Leuven in Belgium had a busy timetable with different activities during their visit at the Universidad de La Frontera and the Araukanía Region, within the framework of the international agreement between both institutions.

On this occasion, the group consisted of Nadine Buys, dean of the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, and the academics Bart Muys and Pol Coppin. Coppin is also an Honorary Professor at the UFRO Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Science. They had a series of meetings in order to get to know the advances and to monitor the cooperation activities of both institutions.

They met with authorities and academics of the Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Science, such as the dean, Rodolfo Pihán, and the vice dean, Adison Altamirano. The visit was based on the specific cooperation agreement this unit made with KU Leuven in 2009 and which had successful results that allowed to expand the partnership in 2017 through the elaboration of a broad cooperation agreement that also defines the double graduation for doctoral UFRO programs.

The agenda of the delegation included meetings with university and faculty authorities. At the same time, they had on-site activities. They visited a forestry company where students of KU Leuven, who are at the UFRO at the moment, are doing their practical training, and went on a tour to the Villarica National Park, considering that the Belgian students who come to the UFRO are specializing in different areas of the field of forestry.

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

One of the planned activities was the meeting with researchers in different fields of the Scientific Technological UFRO Nuclei (BIOREN and Social Science & Humanities). And one of the planned joint projects in the field of science is the creation of an international research institute that considers the UFRO, KU Leuven (Belgium) and Macquarie University (Australia), and possibly an institution from Africa.

The planned institute, which would be located at the UFRO, would focus on global problems, approaching them from a multidisciplinary perspective, including Social Sciences, Engineering, Biological Sciences, etc. Dr. Adison Altamirano commented: “We want to do science which is globally relevant and possible to do from here, the Araukanía Region, a region that fulfills the necessary conditions.”

The representatives of the Belgian university appreciate the partnership they built with the UFRO and the exchange experiences for academics and students, besides the expectations regarding future collaborative actions.

According to Dr. Altamirano, one of these future projects is to advance in the consolidation of a double graduation that both institutions maintain and, particularly, in the case of the Doctoral Program in Agri-food Sciences and Environment. At the same time, he emphasized the link through the Erasmus Project that permitted two students of the Master´s Program in Natural Resource Management to do an internship at KU Leuven.