Summary.    While calls for cross-sector collaborations to tackle complex societal issues abound, in practice, only few succeed. Those that do often have a collaboration intermediary, which can bring together different actors, develop relationships among collaborators,...

Cross-sector collaborations, combining the competencies, skills, and resources of diverse actors, are increasingly seen by academics and professionals alike as the best way to tackle complex societal and environmental issues — and universities are becoming key players in these collaborations.

This is not exactly surprising. Although technology transfer offices in universities often struggle to turn scientific patents into marketable products, when it comes to addressing broader social issues, universities can more fully leverage their considerable educational and research capabilities and institutional strengths. At NYU, for example, faculty come from all over the world to do research across 13 schools and more than 90 research centers and institutes. In 2023, nearly 600 researchers received awards from external sources, such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other federal, city, and state funding agencies, as well as many corporations and foundations.

The student body is highly diverse: at NYU overall, no one ethnic group makes up more than 22% of the total number of students admitted to the class of 2023 and students come from more than 130 countries. They face a bewildering choice of career opportunities — from academia and teaching to professions in law, engineering, or medicine to joining large corporations or starting their own businesses. Universities are also key players in their local communities, partnering with local governments, other local universities, and local businesses on many diverse research and teaching initiatives.

Their capacity to leverage and (potentially) coordinate all these activities makes universities a natural hub for learning and innovation ecosystems. As a 2019 report published by the European University Association points out: “Businesses and governments see the university and its members as ideally suited to ‘connect the dots’ because they are impartial, driven by curiosity and long-term perspectives, rather than by commercial interests and short-term goals.”

But connecting the dots doesn’t just happen, and it involves a lot more than pulling together a diverse collection of partners to brainstorm ideas. It requires carefully curating connections and relationships to get ideas off the drawing board and into the marketplace. Here we draw on the experiences of New York University and the Technical University of Denmark to show how universities can progressively leverage their resources, capabilities, and networks to foster innovation not only by students and faculty, but also by actors in their broader communities. This can be seen as a three-stage process, though the stages will inevitably overlap:

Stage 1: Supporting student innovation

The first way for universities to create social impact is through their education mission, not only through traditional courses, but also by providing an environment that supports students’ onward learning journeys.

Innovation, in particular, is a long and winding journey, with a lot of ups and downs. Universities can support students on it by creating internal initiatives and programs that offer experiential training and coaching as well as connections to outside stakeholders like governmental agencies, businesses, and investors. They not only provide connections and resources, but they orchestrate them so that they provide customized support for students at different moments in their innovation journey.

The experience of We Are the New Farmers, an indoor farming company that uses captured carbon to create sustainable food products from microalgae, illustrates just what universities can do to support their entrepreneurs. The original idea was born from the meeting of three students in the NYU MakerSpace back in 2016, and it came to life when they tapped into the university’s support ecosystem. They were able to move from idea exploration into early prototyping by applying for a small grant to the Prototyping Fund, a collaborative program provided by the Design Lab @ NYU MakerSpace and NYU Entrepreneurial Institute. After producing a successful initial prototype, We Are the New Farmers received an additional $1,500 to develop the prototype further.

During this second phase, one of the Prototyping Fund mentors suggested they apply for the NYU Green grant, run by NYU Office of Sustainability, to build a hydroponic farm. The application was successful, and the startup received $20,000, which they used to build the farm in the MakerSpace basement. They also used part of the grant to attend workshops and conferences and build their own network.

Two years later, in 2018, they participated in the NYU Summer Launchpad, a nine-week-long accelerator program run by the Entrepreneurial Institute. The program offers the eight to 10 teams selected: one-on-one mentorship from entrepreneurs and investors in New York City; training in best practices and Lean Startup methodology; customer discovery; legal and accounting services; and $10,000 in non-dilutive funding. At the end of the Summer Launchpad, We Are the New Farmers was ready to launch its startup, which had evolved beyond the original idea of the vertical farm. From there they were able to secure funding from public agencies like the National Science Foundation and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority as well as from private sources, including a fintech platform.

The NYU Entrepreneurial Institute played a central role in guiding the project’s development. Their approach is to use students’ ideas as a means to teach them how to rigorously explore the business potential and pathways for their idea. Through their engagement with the various programs, students not only assess if their idea has any business potential, but also if they have the drive to be a startup founder. They also learn core startup business skills that they can then use in their next idea or in their career.

Frank Rimalovski, founder and executive director of the Entrepreneurial Institute and managing director of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund, which invests in early-stage NYU startups, explained to us, “While there is a lot of emphasis on innovation spaces and incubators, without the purposeful training and coaching to explore and test those ideas, even fewer of them will see the light of day.” Rimalovski adds, “In a given year, we will see several hundred ideas pursued by our students, about 150 of which will participate in our three-phased Startup Accelerator Program. Of these, roughly 15 to 30 will come to fruition. But 100% of them now have those startup skills.”

This brings us to the second stage of the university’s journey.

Stage 2: Engaging with the broader community

Universities can leverage their experience in supporting student entrepreneurship by contributing to and coordinating incubation hubs in partnership with local governments.  These initiatives are often targeted at developing solutions to the social challenges their communities face.

Take, for instance, the NYU Tandon Future Labs, which connect innovators and entrepreneurs with students, researchers, and faculty as well as businesses and local government. Future Labs were part of then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s response to the financial crisis of 2007/2008.

The aim of Future Labs was to trigger the development of entrepreneurship culture in the city, and they started with the creation in 2009 of an incubator located on Varick Street in Manhattan, a public-private partnership between New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, the predecessor of today’s NYU Tandon School of Engineering. In the same year, a cleantech-focused incubator called ACRE (Accelerating a Clean and Resilient Economy) was established with support of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and co-located with the Varick Street incubator.

Over time, other incubators were created, and they morphed into dedicated Technology Acceleration and Commercialization Hubs supporting startups in specific tech areas — e.g., AI and ML, big data (Data Future Lab), cleantech, climate change, smart city technologies (Urban Future Lab), and a technology-agnostic Veterans Future Lab that supports startups founded or run by military veterans. In 2018, all the different incubators co-located in a new home in NYU Tandon’s building at 370 Jay Street in Brooklyn and formed the present Future Labs network. This move triggered a level of collaboration between the Labs that was not possible while they were geographically separated.

The Labs primarily support startups between seed stage and series A (or equivalent) funding, while still maintaining programs that support early-stage tech ventures. They also organize seminars and events and facilitate student internships and have faculty-in-residence working with tenant companies. As of June 2023, more than 380 companies had graduated, creating more than 3,200 jobs.

The Labs have maintained strong ties to New York City and New York State, long after the public seed funding ended, establishing a broad and deep network of industry partners, many of which collaborate with Future Lab startups on pilot projects and proof-of-concept studies. The Labs also work closely with other innovation and entrepreneurship activities at NYU and are an integral part of the NYC and NYS startup ecosystems. They have established external advisory committees with representation from various stakeholder groups. The members of the advisory committees play an active role in helping shape the operation of the Future Labs and in connecting the startups with external stakeholders.

Once it has the experience of a broader social engagement, a university can contemplate the third stage.

Stage 3: Orchestrating an inclusive ecosystem

Some universities go beyond simply leveraging their networks to support entrepreneurs on their innovation journeys and enriching the local communities — they create and orchestrate complete innovation ecosystems. To do so, they develop connections with multiple partners that they carefully select (across different sectors), then nurture meaningful long-term relationships that they can leverage to support projects in the long run. Such an intentional and holistic approach requires universities to step away from disciplinary silos and embrace a culture of open innovation, experimentation, and iteration.

Take the case of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The innovation ecosystem that DTU’s Technology Transfer Office (part of DTU’s Office for Research, Advice, and Innovation) has developed over the last decade brings together established corporations, startups, and public agencies, illustrating how effective universities like DTU, which engages in more than 1,600 annual research collaborations each year with corporate partners, can be in ecosystem orchestration. In 2021 alone, the DTU ecosystem commercialized 81 inventions, launched 74 new startups, and entered into 1,173 research collaborations with outside companies.

DTU’s leadership made a choice back in 2013 to fundamentally change how startups and spinoffs were viewed. At that time, there was a strong grassroots initiative from the student body in the form of DTU Stardust (the student entrepreneurship organization), which convinced the university president to bridge the grassroots demand and the innovation agenda from the Technology Transfer Office to define its new mission. The Technology Transfer Office took on the orchestrator role, spanning boundaries between the different stakeholders to identify synergies across their sometimes divergent interests.

In the DTU ecosystem, the innovation process is not conceived as a linear journey that goes from basic to applied research and then to commercialization, but more as an iterative series of networked exchanges with different actors, who intervene at different moments of the innovation journey. One of the main actors is DTU SkyLab, an incubator that provides a space for pre- and early-stage startups to grow by providing access to soft funding, prototyping facilities, and, most importantly, ongoing mentoring from the DTU innovation team and business mentors, available not only to students and faculty but also to all would-be entrepreneurs. DTU and its external partners in business and government have also established a Science Park, which supports deep tech and life science companies and startups, a hardware incubator called Danish Tech Challenge, and a venture fund called PreSeed Ventures. All these actors and more provide resources for entrepreneurs in the DTU ecosystem to access resources and expertise.

Christopher James Lüscher, commercialization manager at DTU’s Technology Transfer Office, who was involved in the creation of the DTU ecosystem, explained to us that the current (2020–25) five-year strategy for the university is targeted at making technology work for people. One of the three main pillars of this strategy is sustainability, which requires them to address and find solutions for some of the more complex and difficult challenges society is currently facing. The speed required by these challenges forces them to align their research with key industrial players. As he told us: “This purposeful close collaboration with the backbone of not only [the] Danish but [also the] EU economy allows for [socially] relevant innovation, which drives most of our work at the TTO.”

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While calls for cross-sector collaborations to tackle complex societal issues abound, in practice, only few succeed. Those that do often have a collaboration intermediary, which can bring together different actors, develop relationships among collaborators, and bring together a diverse set of resources and create a community to support ideas over time. With their strengths in knowledge creation and their role as community anchors, universities are ideally equipped to create and orchestrate support for the kind of innovation that the sustainability imperative requires. However, to be able to take on this role they need to develop a culture of open innovation, experimentation and iteration, and value, which requires supporting teams that will champion the change and facilitate collaborations among the diverse actors of the innovation ecosystem.