Public-private partnerships are a very important opportunity for universities to take advantage of. They provide various resources that are not easily obtained by universities such as transfer of the latest skills, know-how, and technologies, internship and job opportunities for students, in addition to money.

Organizations often have opportunities in the form of projects that may require expertise found at a university but finding an efficient point of contact at the university in which to address projects is not always available to organizations. Additionally, the point of contact for the organization is often organized in a single college or department when a project requires a multi-disciplinary (multi-department of college) approach.

Universities that have industry liaisons or other structures may facilitate project intake for multidisciplinary handling and are better equipped to build these relationships and acquire these important organizational resources.

This project would evaluate how universities that are peer and aspirational to ISU are structured to welcome and field these project requests by organizations, identify specific project examples these universities secured, and recommend to ISU how it may structure itself in the future to capitalize on these important opportunities.

Project Mentor

TBD

Competencies needed by faculty and students involved

• Analytics
• Higher education

Final Deliverable

White paper containing trends in university-organization partnerships, examples of how peer and aspirational schools to ISU are having success obtaining multidisciplinary research/student projects from external organizations, evaluating their university structure, and providing recommendations on how ISU could provide a single point of contact for multi-disciplinary projects from organizations