Academic institutions can be instrumental in establishing a set of strategies to facilitate sustained research collaborations, providing opportunities and resources for researchers to improve partnership skills, and changing incentive and reward systems so that more researchers can pursue this work. These institutional commitments are particularly important for encouraging and enabling early career researchers to undertake partnership work.
The William T. Grant Foundation has established an Institutional Challenge Grant to encourage university-based research institutes, schools, and centers to build sustained research-practice partnerships with public agencies or nonprofit organizations. This challenge has been issued to incentivize institutions to shift their policies and practices to value collaborative research and to build the capacity of researchers to produce relevant work and their partners to use research.
