By Divya Abhat, EPIIC Web Team

At Santa Clara University, students in the Robotic Systems Lab take on a truly unique responsibility: running mission control for satellites launched by NASA. The program is led by Chris Kitts, the lab’s founder and director, as well as director of external partnerships for the University.

“It’s amazing,” says Kitts, who has overseen the effort for more than two decades. “We have the communication stations; we have the mission control center; the industry engineers come to our location; and the students go through a course on how to control a satellite and what that means.”

It’s the kind of university-industry partnership that feels like a homerun. But not every partnership needs to be this high profile to be valuable.

The Need for Capacity Building

Santa Clara is part of the Building Institutional Capacity for External Partnerships (BICEP) Cohort of the NSF’s EPIIC program. The goal is clear: strengthen external partnerships that not only support academic programs but also bolster the broader innovation ecosystem.

To do that, Kitts and his colleagues run faculty workshops that demystify how to connect with industry. “Many university faculty have never actually worked in industry,” says Kitts. “So, they’ve never worked in the environment for which they are preparing students. This also means that they often don’t have insight into what industry values and how they operate.” 

As a solution, the Santa Clara EPIIC team adapted an existing workshop that Kitts and others developed a few years ago. The modified workshop spanned 1.5 days and focused on three deceptively simple questions:

• Why: What motivates an industry partnership, and what’s the two-way value proposition?

• What: What forms can engagements take, and how do you strategically evolve from light touches to deep partnerships?

• How: How do you launch a partnership and navigate practical considerations like budgets, finances, IP, NDAs, data sharing, and risk management?

The workshops—a mix of discussions and breakout sessions—are designed to mimic real scenarios such as landing a half-hour meeting with a prospective partner. Participants are asked to prepare for seemingly basic questions such as what’s your university’s IP policy? If you don’t know the answer, you’ve potentially wasted an opportunity.

Breakouts also encourage long-term thinking. Participants work in small groups to identify a real company or organization they’d like to approach and then develop an initial action plan. They’re also asked to think about the future of the partnership—where would you like to see it in three to five years? Partnerships can evolve; for instance, participants may start with a guest lecture or mentoring role, but over time that could grow into joint research or sustained hiring pipelines. The point is to chart a path forward.

By the end, faculty walk away with an action plan and a clearer sense of how to pursue partnerships. In the months that follow, they receive light coaching to help move plans from paper to reality.

Next Steps

In addition to Santa Clara, the other three institutions that are part of the cohort—Grand Valley State University, Lawrence Technological University, and Minnesota State University—have all offered the workshop once in the past year and will continue to do so over the next two years. The workshops are tailored to the local institution, building concrete, campus-specific strategies.

“What we're trying to do is to get the savvy folks at each of the institutions to play the role of mentor and to kind of foster that over the course of the following three to six months,” says Kitts.

While the target size for each workshop is 8-10 participants, the demand in the first year was so high that each group ended up being twice that size, with more than 90 participants across the four schools. 

Kitts is also developing a manual to capture lessons learned. Most of the questions organizers get from faculty are about internal processes—budgets, compliance, why certain rules exist. As a result, the manual includes not just the big picture of why, what, and how, but also detailed examples and appendices that faculty can use as practical references. What’s more, Kitts and J.D. Yoder, the Dean of Engineering at Ohio Northern University, recently offered the workshop for other EPIIC institutions, specifically the University of Detroit, Mercy and Andrews University. 

“We see a great need for faculty and staff professional development in this area, and we’re open to sharing our workshop experience with other EPIIC universities,” says Kitts.

The workshops are about more than knowledge transfer; they’re about shifting mindsets. While faculty already know partnerships are valuable, the EPIIC team is helping them articulate why, see it from industry’s perspective, and then take the first real steps to make it happen.

“Success breeds success,” says Kitts. “If you didn't think that this was really right for you, but all of a sudden you have half a dozen of your colleagues that are talking about this and doing more of it, it should at least make you think, ‘what about me?’”