The Blueprint for Growing Strategic Partnerships

Grace shares the inside story of building ASU’s strategic partnerships infrastructure from a one-person operation into a powerhouse function. As Vice President of Partnerships, she explains the foundational steps: mapping capabilities, gaining leadership buy-in, and embedding a culture of collaboration. Her advice is practical: start small, build trust, and scale strategically.

So to get started with partnerships, I think it's great to have an understanding of what your institution's capabilities are. So doing that internal landscape and survey, getting buy in internally first and then also figuring out doing a capacity analysis or landscape analysis both internally and externally. Understanding where your capabilities are, where are your strengths, your uniqueness, and how could you position that to an external partner.

And then where might you have some gaps where a partner organization or a different industry or company can help you fill in advance? So it's really important also to create that culture of collaboration, meaning that we're going to do this because it'll make us stronger in the long term or more strategic in this area is really important to communicate to your stakeholders internally that this is the direction we're going in and we're stronger through partnerships is also key.

So when you're setting up and thinking through what you need to build these partnership capabilities, yes, leadership buy in is key. But you also need all of the layers, the next layers down to think through okay, what's the strategy. What are some of the goals and objectives. How will we hold ourselves accountable. So I think at every level you need people thinking about the partnership and how it's going to advance different parts of the university.

So for example, your provost may be thinking through, you know, how can this partnership help enhance and shape curriculum design and student outcomes? Your chief research officer may be thinking about the R&D piece. How can we partner to advance research, to produce more technology that can be licensed by external parties? So thinking about it from that view.

But then you need the partnership people. And that's the layer I'm most passionate about. The people who wake up thinking about what's going to happen to the partnership today. How are we going to advance things. The people that go to sleep thinking about it, they might even dream about it, I do too. And so we those are the people that are day to day making sure that the partnership is advancing, that we're advancing on our portfolio.

We're tracking towards our goals and metrics. And that's really key. And then how do we report back to leadership, where those who care could be community members too, could be the partner organizations that how are we affecting change and how are we having the outcomes that we intended? So from the alignment all the way down from leadership to the tactical execution level is key.