ABSTRACT
International organizations notes that the main weakness for innovation in Latin American countries is that their national research organizations only evaluate and stimulate pure academic personnel by publications and citations, forgetting those who work in industry, losing a vast potential in each country. Higher education institutions must increase the development and innovation if they want to contribute to the third mission, which means the economic development of a country, in addition to the traditional advanced education and research, to adapt to new realities for the knowledge-based economies. Commercial war, SARS COV-2, and energy crisis drive policymakers and university managers to rethink and redesign institutions. This work offers an approach to measure the research, development, and innovation capabilities of three telecommunications engineering careers in three Latin American universities in Mexico and Ecuador looking for to increasing capabilities when doing collaboration. Results confirm that the knowledge contribution in engineering is proportional to the number of supported engineering careers, even mapped to national and international rankings. Also is confirmed that research is related to the academic production, but development and innovation are more related to an effective relation to industry. © 2022 IEEE.