Partnerships Can Power Revolution in Higher Ed and Serve Society

A persistent theme in our “Sustainability Insights” essays during the last three years has been that universities have a great deal of unrealized potential to help solve urgent, important societal problems. In this last post before I retire, I describe how we at Cornell Atkinson are helping Cornell University realize its potential more than ever in the overlapping domains of climate, energy, food, and health. It is my hope that our experience at Cornell may inform like-minded leaders at other universities as they further develop interdisciplinary university-based centers and institutes with a focus on external impact; and that leaders in corporations, NGOs, and government agencies will look to Cornell and other research universities as potential co-creators of research agendas that will result in public benefit via goods and services provided by the private and/or public sectors.

The State of University Research & Public Trust

In a past post, I wrote that to make research more immediately useful, universities “need to create incentives for research transcending traditional disciplines,” adopt a “more humble attitude to enable collaboration with those without Ph.D.s,” and build “long-term strategic partnerships with non-university organizations that can help guide research and increase the scale of its application to solve real-world problems” (July 2023). And I’ve written that while many universities have invested in technological innovation and commercialization, the power of which was quantified in a recent Science article on Pasteur’s quadrant research, “few analogous efforts support the research and collaboration needed for innovations in corporate practice and government policy that, alongside technological innovation, are essential to solving society’s more wicked … problems like climate change” (November 2023).

I’ve also noted the decline in public trust in universities, which is linked to the perceived usefulness of research. Although only 68% of people have a “great deal/quite a lot” or “some” confidence in higher education, much greater proportions believe that universities are “somewhat” or “very important” for technology (91%), science (90%), healthcare (83%), and economic growth (83%), according to the October 2025 report from Higher Education Barometer. Clearly, the public appreciates the role university research plays in finding solutions to societal needs, suggesting that universities could increase public trust by further incentivizing useful research. Land-grant universities like Cornell are particularly well positioned to do this.

How We Accelerate Our Research-to-Impact Mission

In Cornell Atkinson’s flagship Innovation for Impact Fund, we act like a small foundation. Led by our partnerships team, which Patrick Beary directs, we fund Cornell researchers to work on co-created projects with collaborators supported by their home organizations (NGOs, corporations, or other private and public sector organizations). The impact we are after is to have Cornell research inform public opinion, corporate practices and products, or government policies.

As we’ve refined our goals and processes and broadened our partnerships over the last seven years, we’ve gotten more successful. For projects that were initiated at least two years ago, 90% are achieving at least one desired impact, with impacts attained in all four target categories: public opinion (64%); corporate practice (45%): products (36%); and public policy (64%). Of course, many (83%) of these projects also had positive spillover impacts on the curriculum or other educational programs.

In the table below, I provide one example each of projects across our four impact categories and our four priority areas of research. At the bottom of this essay, you will find a key with web links to fuller descriptions of each of these projects.