Academia

The Challenge:

Despite their broad missions, universities often remain siloed—limiting opportunities to align research, teaching, and public engagement with the needs and priorities of communities, industries, and policy systems.”

What’s Possible?

Advance the influence and integration of your academic mission by partnering across sectors to co-create solutions, inform policy, and accelerate student and societal outcomes.

What this looks like in action

  • By collaborating with government open pathways for policy influence and real-world application. For example, a social innovation lab co-created with local government and nonprofits

  • Partnering with industry could include applying machine learning innovations to public health challenges.

  • Philanthropy partnerships could include funding for an interdisciplinary research center where research teams co-develop community-based solutions for disaster resilience with local NGOs and government planners

Example Partnership Models

2. Partnerships for Research-to-Use Pathways  

Research translation partnerships create structured pathways for aligning academic research with the needs and priorities of practitioners, policymakers, and communities. Effective models emphasize co-definition of research questions, iterative engagement, and the translation of evidence into decision-ready formats, as part of the early co-design strategies. 

Sectors involved:

  • Academia

  • Community-Based Organizations Non-Profit

  • Government administrators and Policymakers

  • Philanthropy

Regions: Africa, Central and East Asia, South Asia, South America, US, Global 

  • Under the USAID funded LASER PULSE program, we developed the Embedded Research Translation (ERT) model to structure collaboration between researchers and development practitioners from project inception to implementation.

    The model includes a four-stage process: stakeholder co-definition of problems, joint development of research scope and methods, periodic evidence-use consultations, and co-creation of policy and practice products.

    This model was applied across 50 applied research projects globally and has been adopted by USAID and academic institutions as a framework for designing research that informs real-world decisions. 

3. Partnerships for Tech Transfer & Innovation Commercialization 

Tech transfer partnerships bridge academic research and real-world application by enabling technologies developed in university settings to reach markets and communities. Effective models align research incentives with commercial pathways and development needs, while building institutional capacity to manage innovation pipelines. 

Sectors involved:

  • Community-Based Organizations Non-Profit

  • Government administrators and Policymakers

  • Industry / Private sector

  • Philanthropy

Regions: Africa, South Asia, US 

  • At Purdue University, we contributed to the design of interdisciplinary tech transfer frameworks that connected engineering research with global development outcomes.

    Working within the Shah Global Innovation Lab in the College of Engineering, we supported models that engaged faculty, commercialization experts, and development actors in co-assessing technologies for market viability—considering both low-resource community needs and private sector scaling potential.

    This approach informed licensing, open-access dissemination, and entrepreneurial spinouts for technologies targeting clean water, sustainable energy, health, education, and agricultural innovation. 

7. Purposeful Stakeholder Engagement  

Effective partnerships begin with the right questions—and the right conversations. Purposeful engagements create structured spaces for stakeholders to surface root causes, align on priorities, and design actionable strategies. When grounded in systems thinking, these engagements go beyond consultation to build collective insight and lasting momentum. 

Sectors involved:

  • Academia

  • Community-Based Organizations / Non-Profit

  • Government administrators and Policymakers

  • Industry / Private Sector

  • Philanthropy

Regions: Africa, Central and East Asia, South Asia, South America, US 

  • As part of USAID funded Asia Resilient Cities (ARC’s) early implementation, city-level diagnostics brought together local government, civil society, and community members to co-define climate resilience priorities.

    These sessions enabled city stakeholders to surface cross-cutting issues—such as climate risk and informal economic exclusion—and structure work plans around local context and institutional capacity.

    These diagnostics informed the co-creation of city resilience strategies, helping to align funding, governance reforms, and policy shifts around locally defined priorities. 

  • A multi-city forum series was designed to address epidemic preparedness by connecting local needs with national decision-making.

    The process combined stakeholder interviews, needs assessments, and facilitated dialogues across four regions, culminating in a national synthesis convening.

    The model emphasized stakeholder-driven framing, cross-sector collaboration, and the translation of community insights into actionable public health communication strategies. 

  • This engagement applied a structured systems method—Comprehensive Success Factor Analysis (CSFA)—to help USAID, academic, NGO and local government partners in Colombia identify root challenges across youth development, rural livelihoods, and migration.

    This method combined pre-conference surveys, expert scoping groups, and in-workshop mapping to generate “issue trees” and narrow sector challenges to actionable research focus areas.

    By combining researcher-practitioner engagement with systems gap analysis, the model enabled USAID and its partners to align future research funding with high-impact, field-defined needs.