Investing in University-Government Innovation Partnerships
In a new policy memo published by the Brookings Institution, SSRC President Anna Harvey and coauthors call for investment in university-government innovation partnerships to increase the capacity of state and local governments to innovate, evaluate, and implement more effective ways of delivering vital public goods and services.
At a time when many in our nation’s capital appear to see little value in the research enterprise, state and local governments are eager to partner with universities on research projects that help agencies innovate, evaluate, and implement more effective ways of delivering vital public goods and services. With the support of the 2025 17 Rooms flagship, an initiative of The Rockefeller Foundation and the Brookings Institution to advance the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, we convened “Room 16”: a working group drawn from state and local governments, university research labs, and philanthropic foundations to explore how we might increase the capacity of state and local governments to produce more value for each dollar of public investment.
Room 16 considered the problem of insufficient state capacity to innovate. Developing, testing, and implementing new and better ways of delivering public goods and services requires staff with specialized skills. State and local governments lacking sufficient personnel with these skills may become over reliant on expensive (and potentially underperforming) external contractors, underuse administrative data to generate useful evidence, and miss opportunities to improve the quality of public goods and services.
Universities are home to researchers with the skills that can help agencies to develop, evaluate, and implement more effective ways of delivering public goods and services. Because of universities’ research and public service missions, university talent pools can provide agencies with cost-effective capacity to innovate. Yet there are high transaction costs to developing university-government research collaborations, and many potential collaborations fail to materialize even when their value substantially exceeds their cost.
Our memo calls for a state and local government innovation fund to make catalytic investments that reduce the initial startup costs preventing many university-government innovation partnerships from developing. Once launched, these partnerships can become self-sustaining over time, providing value to both universities and communities.
We are committed to working to launch the state and local government innovation fund envisioned by Room 16. If you are interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at policyinnovation@ssrc.org!