Impact can be defined in various ways. Taxpayer supported programs usually require a public good benefit for some broad group of people. The most commonly used and easily implemented impact measures are those of economic benefit. Environmental, nutritional, health and other impacts can be equally important, but usually harder to measure.

            Some ideas for increasing the impact of CRSPs include: a) focus on key problems – CRSP successes often have occurred where significant resources are focused on a well defined problem. b) choice of partners – CRSP research and technology transfer has been more successful when the central mission of developing country partners is agricultural technology development and technology transfer. CRSP partnerships with developing country universities have often led on human capacity development, but lagged on economic and other impact because these universities are typically primarily undergraduate teaching institutions and because they usually do not have an explicit technology transfer responsibility. c) long term commitment – U.S. universities, developing country partners and the donor must realize from the beginning that substantive improvements will take time, often five or 10 years. In particular, linking CRSPs to the two year cycle of assignments in USAID missions (e.g mission buy-ins)could have a negative effect on CRSP impact.