Unlocking The Power of Partnerships for

Business

What’s Possible?

Cross-sector partnerships help companies move beyond transactional partnerships and CSR and toward trusted, long-term value creation.

The Challenge

Companies are under growing pressure to innovate responsibly, yet many struggle to align business goals with societal expectations, stakeholder trust and long-term system needs.

Invite Us for a Partnership Talk

Real conversations on what it takes to partner with purpose.

Complementary 1-hour presentation on topics like:

  • Beyond the Deal: Transforming B2B partnerships into long-term, strategic alliances.

  • CSR That Matters: Designing social impact initiatives with real business and community value.

  • Partnering Inside and Out: Aligning teams and systems to collaborate more effectively.

  • Seeing the System: Applying systems thinking to navigate markets, communities, and change.

What’s Possible for Businesses

Partnerships for Social Innovation

These offer businesses a way to collaborate with communities, entrepreneurs and policy makers to address systemic challenges. These efforts create shared value by aligning business strategy with social impact, shifting relationships, rethinking value chains and opening new pathways for inclusive growth.

  • Through initiatives like the FifthEstate, we designed multi-stakeholder models that bridged social innovation models with institutional decision-making processes.

    The approach included convening intergenerational coalitions, facilitating structured dialogue between community-based organizations and government bodies, and embedding youth-driven policy recommendations into formal systems.

    These partnerships enabled social entrepreneurs and grassroots leaders to influence governance structures—leading to programmatic uptake by public institutions and philanthropic actors, and shifts in national policy frameworks. 

Business-to-Business Partnerships

Industry partnerships include B2B collaborations that drive innovation and growth. These models foster trust, unlock new markets and create shared value through co-developing products or services.

  • During our time in a Fortune 500 manufacturing company, we observed firsthand how business-to-business partnerships across IT, logistics, and supply chains often lacked strategic coherence. These partnerships were frequently treated as transactional rather than relational, with limited shared goal-setting or mechanisms to evaluate partner health. This experience shaped our understanding of what’s needed: clear partnership strategies, shared KPIs, CRM tools to track partner experience, and internal governance models that recognize partnership as a core business function, not a side activity.

Locally Led Community Partnerships 

Locally led community partnerships offer businesses a meaningful way to engage with and invest in the places where they operate. Through these models businesses strengthen supply chains, build inclusive workforce pathways and invest in communities through trust-based collaboration.

  • Based on field research in Indiana communities, this model highlights what helps local partnerships move from planning to impact.

    Through the Hometown Collaboration Initiative, nonprofits, public agencies, and residents co-developed strategies to address housing, health, and equity.

    Success hinged on clear roles, adaptive structures, and communication routines, paired with leadership development and participatory planning processes.

    The model offers funders and nonprofit leaders a roadmap for building partnerships that are inclusive, actionable, and built to last. 

Purposeful Stakeholder Engagement  

Purposeful stakeholder engagements help businesses surface market insights, align priorities and co-create solutions, building trust and accelerating action across sectors.

  • 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. 

Tech Transfer, Commercialization

Innovation and tech transfer partnerships help businesses turn research into real-world solutions, advancing market-ready technologies, strengthening pipelines and creating shared value through collaboration.

  • At Purdue’s Shah Global Innovation Lab, we contributed to the design of innovation ecosystems that positioned community needs and social impact as central drivers of technology development, and customization.

    Rather than relying solely on traditional tech transfer pipelines, the lab cultivated partnerships among researchers, social entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations and end users to co-design solutions with dual-market strategies.

    These ecosystems enabled technologies in water, energy, agriculture and health to be developed with affordability, accessibility, and adoptability in mind, shifting how innovation is conceptualized, financed, and distributed for impact. 

Multi-Stakeholder Systems Change

These models help businesses align their products, services and strategies with systems change, unlocking innovation, strengthening market relevance and driving long-term value through collaboration with diverse actors.

  • Through applied research and systems analysis, we have developed partnership frameworks that help organizations build meaningful relationships with the private sector. Our work with USAID included mapping the full partnership lifecycle, from opportunity framing to co-implementation and developing tools to assess partner motivation, process fit, and trust dynamics. This approach has been adopted to strengthen industry-university alliances, corporate social innovation initiatives, and global development collaborations. By clarifying roles, aligning incentives, and addressing early-stage bottlenecks, these models help organizations move from ad hoc engagement to strategic co-creation.