Corporate and Industry Partnerships

Our mission is to equip our corporate and industry partners with the knowledge and organizational practices they need to build resilient, future-facing, and growth-minded cultures of innovation. Innovation requires both the right mindset and the right toolset, and at Notre Dame Futures Group, we’ve developed educational experiences to instill it in your organization. We do it in several different ways, ranging from year-long custom-designed partnerships to smaller, light-touch learning experiences.

Custom Partnerships

To tackle your biggest strategic challenges, build your knowledge and practice of innovation, and to partner with our network of faculty, alumni, and a global array of industry partners, the best option is to build a custom partnership. We’ll codesign the program with you, spotlighting your biggest needs, helping you understand the landscape, and working together to innovate and scale your solution.

Our Ideal Partners

The Notre Dame Futures Group partners with organizations who know that it’s paramount to innovate, but are unsure how to make it a priority and habit. Our ideal partners are experts in their fields, eager to tackle their biggest challenges as they learn our Innovation Methodology. We work with innovation teams, growth teams, those focused on new strategic initiatives, and business leaders looking to fold innovation into their daily work. When you engage with Notre Dame Futures Group, you’ll gain access to our expert community of faculty, alumni, and students, building your network and capacity as you instill a culture of innovation.

How Our Partnerships Work

Organizational Analysis

Codesigning a path to true innovation starts with assuring everyone at your organization is on the same page. We start with your entire executive and innovation teams, to understand how innovation is understood at the top level and how it fits into your overarching strategic plan. Often, innovation and executive teams aren’t fully aligned, leaving powerful ideas to languish because they weren’t core to a company’s strategy in the first place. To ensure that doesn't happen in our partnership, we dive into annual, midterm, and long range plans, looking at prioritization and resourcing. The goal is to ensure that your organization is aligned, resourced, and empowered to find sustainable solutions to your core challenges. 

Identify the Challenge

Once the groundwork is laid in the Current State Analysis, we’ll help pull together an inventory of the challenges your cohort might tackle. Together, we’ll select the right challenges and match the people in your cohort to the areas where they can have the most impact and achieve their learning objectives. 

Ready, Set, Innovate

To earn your Strategic Innovation Methodology certificate, we’ll partner for 6-8 months as your team learns our approach, and comes to a solution to your challenge. You’ll not just have a viable, scalable solution, but your team will develop the knowledge, mindset, and practice to help them consistently innovate on their own. As you partner with the Notre Dame Futures Group down the line, you’ll take on even more complex challenges, reaching even more innovative solutions. 

Let’s Get Started

The Futures Group will collaborate with your organization to create learning experiences linked directly to your unique business challenges. We value face-to-face interaction, long-term partnerships, and the guidance of veteran innovation practitioners who have walked the long road of culture change.

To learn more about how we can support you with custom experiences, please contact Futures Group Director Mary Scott at maryscott@nd.edu.