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Higher Education Industry Partnerships and Innovation with Salesforce?

When thinking of Salesforce for Higher Education institutions, it is common to find solutions specific to the student lifecycle. But within innovation centers, the types of solutions needed are vastly different. Salesforce can take on a different approach specifically for transforming corporate partnerships, industry engagement, and sponsored research. Salesforce allows your Technology Transfer Office and corporate partnership teams to have a centralized platform that supports intellectual property management, academic entrepreneurship, and industry-academia partnerships by providing the tools to streamline operations, track opportunities, and foster collaboration between your institution and the corporate world.

Unlike traditional methods—disconnected spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems—Salesforce provides a comprehensive, cloud-based solution that transforms how you engage with corporate and industry partners. And when layering in AI, Salesforce can help your team uncover untapped potential by identifying trends, predicting partnership opportunities, and providing actionable insights to optimize your engagement strategy.

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Why Salesforce is Your New Best Friend for Corporate Partnerships, Commercialization, and Research

Higher education institutions often struggle with disconnected systems and manual processes that hinder their ability to manage partnerships, track research opportunities, and support workforce development. Salesforce offers a unified platform that transforms these challenges into opportunities for growth, efficiency, and impact.

Here’s how leveraging Salesforce can deliver better outcomes for your innovation center:

Build Stronger, More Effective Partnerships

Salesforce allows you to grow partnerships from inquiry to formal agreement by centralizing data and streamlining processes. With the ability to:

  • Track Every Touchpoint: Maintain a 360-degree view of partner relationships across departments.
  • Share Engagement Activity: Enable cross-institutional collaboration by providing visibility into partnership activities.
  • Score and Analyze Partner Performance: Identify top-performing partners using KPIs like sponsored research, alumni employment, donations, and more.
  • Curate Actionable Dashboards: Equip leadership with data-driven insights for strategic decision-making.

Outcome: Stronger, data-backed partnerships that maximize value for your institution and corporate partners.

Advance Research and Technology Commercialization

Salesforce simplifies the complex workflows involved in research commercialization, technology transfer, and intellectual property management:

  • Manage patents, contracts, and IP licenses in one central location.
  • Streamline compliance and contract requirements to reduce administrative burden.
  • Track and support start-ups with tools for incubator program management, including space and equipment tracking.
  • Facilitate joint research activities by enabling real-time collaboration with industry partners.

Outcome: Accelerate the path from research to real-world solutions while ensuring compliance and maximizing impact.

Enhance Workforce Development and Community Impact

Salesforce empowers your institution to lead workforce development initiatives by:

  • Tracking continuing education and professional development enrollment to meet evolving industry needs.
  • Facilitating co-ops, internships, and career placements that connect students with corporate partners.
  • Bringing industry expertise into the classroom to ensure your programs remain relevant and impactful.
  • Measuring economic and financial impact with robust reporting tools.

Outcome: Prepare students for meaningful careers while strengthening relationships with local government, community organizations, and industry leaders.

Foster Joint Ventures and Innovation

Salesforce provides the tools to establish industry-focused research centers, facilitate sponsorships, and share resources and expertise with corporate partners. By managing these initiatives within a single platform, institutions can:

  • Encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.
  • Streamline sponsorship agreements to reduce administrative barriers.
  • Monitor the success of joint ventures with real-time data and analytics.

Outcome: Drive innovation and position your institution as a leader in academic-corporate collaboration.

One Connected Solution Tailored for your Specific Use Cases

Corporate and Industry Partnerships

Salesforce helps you build and manage relationships with external partners from initial inquiry to formal partnership.

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Technology Transfer & Commercialization

Leverage Salesforce to bring your intellectual property (IP) to market quickly by utilizing powerful automation, workflow, contract management, and analytics capabilities.

woman working on research

Sponsored Programs & Research Administration

Allow your faculty and researchers to focus on delivering ground-breaking research by managing compliance, grant requirements, and expenditures in one comprehensive solution.

The Power of Data Analytics

With Salesforce, our team at Redpath can create customized dashboards to monitor the impact of industry-academia partnerships, corporate philanthropy, and research collaboration efforts. These insights can inform leadership and support data-driven strategies for growth.

Visualize Key Metrics

Track KPIs like research funding, technology licenses, and employment outcomes.

Monitor Research Impact

See how sponsored research and commercialization efforts contribute to your institution’s mission.

Share Results

Provide leadership with actionable insights to support decision-making.

Redpath is a trusted Salesforce Implementation Partner.

As a proud Salesforce partner, Redpath Consulting Group helps educational institutions implement Salesforce Education Cloud – a comprehensive solution tailored to meet the evolving needs of higher education. Education Cloud leverages Salesforce’s core Sales and Service platform alongside powerful industry components that are built to empower your team to drive innovation. Education Cloud is AI and Agentforce ready and is built to be future-proof. 

Getting Started:

  • Education Cloud leveraging Sales, Service, and bespoke industry cloud functionality
  • Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for internal and external communications
  • Slack delivers real-time collaboration for both internal staff, faculty, researcher and external partners
  • Data Cloud to enable connectivity to external systems and enrich data
Salesforce Education Cloud Redpath Consulting Minneapolis MN
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Redpath
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And more!

Take a look at some of the institutions we’ve had an impact on

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Read about our higher education Salesforce success story with the University at Buffalo below.

“Redpath created an environment of trust that resulted in a solution that was customized to our business. They are now a vested partner.”

Tracy Krawczyk-Schiedel

Assistant VP for Communications, Marketing and Digital Operations Research and Economic Development
University at Buffalo

Nationally Recognized, Trusted Salesforce Partner

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