Toward Achieving the Energy Transition Through Corporate-University Partnerships

Abstract

The energy industry is increasingly moving toward a global energy system that is lower carbon, transitioning from predominantly hydrocarbons to including more renewable and sustainable energy sources. The amount of multidimensional change – spanning culture, technology, education, infrastructure, and policy – required to achieve this transition requires more than any one source of innovation. Two common historical sources of innovation have been corporations and universities. Both corporations and universities typically recognize the value of partnering with one another, but there are almost as many partnership approaches as there are partnerships, with most created as bespoke agreements. What if these partnerships had a common structural framework from which to systematically select the right approach to enable the energy transition?

This thesis seeks to address corporate-university partnerships as a sociotechnical system and evaluate partnership architecture decisions in enabling the energy transition. The research analyzes corporate-university partnership architectural patterns broadly across all industries as well as specific to the energy industry, investigates case studies of corporate-university partnerships focused on the energy transition, seeks to understand potential architectural changes post-pandemic, and proposes an architectural framework, evaluation, and portfolio approach for corporate-university partnerships enabling the energy transition.