From Coffee to Clinics: How Partnerships Scale

Grace discusses two of ASU’s most iconic collaborations: Starbucks and Mayo Clinic. Grace details how a simple conversation between CEOs sparked the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, changing lives for thousands of working learners. She also unpacks ASU’s 20-year partnership with Mayo Clinic, where education, research, and clinical care converge.

We work with industry partners of all sizes from those giant brand names that you can recognize, like Starbucks or Mayo Clinic, all the way to medium sized businesses and startup companies. The story around all of these start in different places. So with Starbucks, for example, this is really the CEOs hitting it all.

So Howard Schultz at the time and Michael Crowe were on a panel together talking about education and how so many people in America have started college, do not have a degree. And at Starbucks, they were really innovating around what could they offer their employees in terms of benefits. So that's how the Starbucks and ASU College Achievement Plan was born.

It's how can we give every Starbucks employee an opportunity to get their degree from ASU? So it was just that spark of, really a chance meeting on a panel at a conference that led to now having, you know, many years later, having over 16,000 graduates of the program. And over 26,000 current participants. So it's a really has a life of its own now where people are coming to apply to a Starbucks all over to say, you know, I heard you had this great program that can help me achieve my degree.

And so those stories from that program are just so impactful and so life changing for these individuals who have gone through them. I think it builds that affinity for Starbucks and also for ASU. But since we've had such a great experience working together in that one area of education benefits, Starbucks now sees ASU as a trusted partner.

So whenever they need something else, they pick up the phone and call us and say, hey, can you help us in sustainability research or technology? And the answer is always yes, and we'll figure out a way and how to create new solutions together. But that one program built so much trust, and it's helped the partnership expand into so many different areas that we couldn't have imagined that day one.

So the partnership with Mayo Clinic came about when Mayo Clinic Arizona was starting up here in, in the greater Phoenix region, and they didn't have an academic institution attached to them. And ASU also did not have a medical school at the time. So it just made a lot of sense for Mayo Clinic. And ASU to work together. This is over 20 years ago and about ten years into the relationship, we thought we okay, we can create a formal Mayo Clinic, an ASU alliance for health care.

We built that structure and then since then, Mayo Clinic has opened a medical school in Arizona where their students get joint degrees with ASU. So you can have an MD from Mayo Clinic School of Medicine and a J.D. from ASU law, for example. We have multiple programs like that. And then so that partnership has also grown and evolved over the years.

Our nursing school does most of their training and clinical rotations at Mayo Clinic. And the Mayo Clinic hires the majority of those nurses. So it's become this great pipeline talent feeder incubation program. We've also grown into other areas, like the health care accelerator, where we are both helping life science and medtech startups get started. They can have, expertise from the medical field, from Mayo Clinic and entrepreneurship innovation training from ASU, and then go and expand their grow their companies in the region.

And then all of this is really has a physical the station as well. ASU has built our health futures center next to Mayo Clinic, and we have 26 acres to expand on this innovation zone. And then Mayo Clinic has since invested over $1 billion to build out their Phoenix campus, of which ASU is right in the middle of.

And so we can both jointly attract partners to come work with us and collaborate and do research, advanced patient care. So there's so many aspects of the Mayo Clinic and ASU Alliance for Health Care. We've also helped Mayo upskill their employees. So as I and other new technologies come out, we do primers for their nurses or schedulers, for example, when their physicians also need to know the health care business and how to do hospital administration, they've come to our W.P. Carey School of Business to get that executive education training for all their physician leaders.

So it's really become this wonderful, ecosystem where we're really helping each other in all these different ways. And now ASU will have its own medical school, and that's extremely exciting. So we see collaborations happening in that vein as well, but also with our other clinical partners like on our health will be our clinical affiliate for the medical school.

And we still work with Phoenix Children's Hospital and Dignity Health Saint Joe's. So it's a whole constellation of how partners can come together and have these complementary capabilities and populations that we work with. And I think that's how ASU also helps us serve our charter, because we work with everybody to ensure that there's access included and designed in everything that we do so that, you know, we can serve different communities, different populations, different geographical regions of Arizona.

And we utilize partnerships as a way to do that.