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Higher education is coming under increasing scrutiny, both publically and within academia, with respect to its ability to appropriately prepare students for the careers that will make them competitive in the 21st-century workplace. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that many global issues will require creative and critical thinking deeply rooted in the technical STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.

Transforming Institutions brings together chapters from the scholars and leaders who were part of the 2011 and 2014 conferences. It provides an overview of the context and challenges in STEM higher education, contributed chapters describing programs and research in this area, and a reflection and summary of the lessons from the many authors' viewpoints, leading to suggested next steps in the path toward transformation.

AbstractCross‐sector partnerships (CSPs) are important for tackling development challenges across public, private, and non‐profit sectors. Despite their growing prevalence as partnership models of choice for grand challenge efforts, there is little evidence‐based understanding about the dominant features of these engagements. This makes it difficult to develop CSP engagement models that are useful across development problems and settings. We posit that CSPs are intrinsically cross‐disciplinary endeavors and require collaboration models that enable interdisciplinary problem orientation and solution casting. To facilitate sense‐making in partnership efforts, a CSP engagement model must therefore integrate perspectives on partnership from major disciplines and practitioner experiences. Using automated content analysis of peer‐reviewed publications and manual content analysis of practitioner interviews, we explored the robustness and relevance of partnership capacity theory (PCT), an interdisciplinary CSP engagement model, as an evidence‐based approach to CSP with best‐practice grounding. We found PCT comprehensively characterizes collaborative CSP dynamics and offers a foundational view of CSP best practices.

AbstractPrivate sector engagement (PSE) is increasingly acknowledged in both literature and practice as a necessary mechanism to sustainably address development challenges. Despite increased practitioner and academic interest in these partnerships, there have been negligible attempts to systematically investigate cross‐sector partnerships to distill best practices from the multiple environments in which they are employed. This manuscript presents a robust review of the social science and business literatures on cross‐sector partnerships, yielding an interdisciplinary, evidence‐based framework detailing archetypes of three prominent partnership characteristics of purpose, context, and relationship enablers. This work integrates a wide range of best practices and values pertinent to businesses and society, enabling researchers, practitioners, and partnership managers to characterize and evaluate partnerships systematically. The introduced framework also enables partners to situate and evaluate their partnership activities to optimize outcomes for each partner and impact on the challenge at hand.