Corporate universities have emerged as a mechanism for providing companies with a wide variety of training and development activities. They are a recent but under-researched phenomenon, and given their substantial budgets, it might be expected that they would wish to evaluate what they do. The authors explore the evaluation practices of six Italian corporate universities, paying particular attention to the means by which these practices are tailored to the needs of the various stakeholders. Stakeholder-based evaluation provides the theoretical framework for the study.

The literature suggests that much evaluation of training focuses on a single stakeholder, the shareholder, and that practice draws heavily on Kirkpatrick's hierarchical model. In the context of the corporate university, however, the authors find that multi-stakeholder evaluation is used in practice. Moreover, various aspects of corporate university performance were evaluated, and data were supplied to stakeholders depending on the nature of their involvement. Stakeholder-based evaluation is argued to be a useful framework where there are a number of stakeholders, but training evaluation models other than the hierarchical one are needed if all relevant training factors are to be evaluated. The implications for research and practice are discussed