Building a Market-Smart Organizational Structure for University-Industry Partnership

With amplified interest in growing partnerships with companies, universities must evaluate their current partnership strategy and seek new ways to diversify and deepen their industry engagements. Read our brief to learn how to develop a market-smart organizational design.

With amplified interest in growing partnerships with companies, universities must evaluate their current partnership strategy and seek new ways to diversify and deepen their industry engagements.

The University Research Forum created this resource to help leaders develop a market-smart organizational design. The first section details the factors that drive university leaders to rethink existing organizational structures, establish the key actors in the partnership landscape, and articulate what their industry partnership organizational structure attempts to achieve.

The second section offers three archetypes that provide an in-depth overview of market-smart organizational structures. Leaders can use these archetypes to determine which components will fit their universities best. Download the brief or explore each section below.

The case for market-smart partnership organizational structures

University efforts to improve their industry partnership strategy have produced suboptimal results as they insufficiently addressed their organizational design flaws. Lacking a refined and institutional strategy-aligned structure, many universities confront a multiplicity of partnership goals and missions, increased competition for industry investments between other universities, and internal conflict among institutional units.

To address these shortcomings, university leaders must rethink their organizational structure in response to three emerging institutional imperatives:

Align partnership engagements to institutional missions Promote a distinctive value proposition for partnering Present a unified front to market

A market-smart organizational design incorporates these imperatives to balance industry needs with university goals, empowering institutional strategy for greater private sector collaboration and better serving corporate partners.

Profiled market…