The Partnership Imagination Problem

You're staring at the Partnerships and Collaborations section of your CAREER proposal. You've written the research plan with energy and specificity. The education plan has detail. But broader impacts? You write a few sentences about partnering with local schools and move on.

Or maybe you've done this a few times now. Each proposal has some version of the same broader impacts: mentoring undergraduates, developing curriculum, disseminating results. They're legitimate activities. They've gotten funded. But nothing feels connected. Nothing builds.

Your colleague down the hall is doing something with a water sanitation district. Someone in engineering is embedded with FEMA. A biologist has a five-year relationship with a regional science center that includes exhibit development, teacher professional development, and undergraduate research placements.

You hear about these and think: "That's creative, but how did they even get there?" The gap between "partner with a local organization" and "build a multi-sector engagement strategy" fee

ls enormous.

The imagination problem has specific causes.

Training. Most faculty learned to write broader impacts by reading what got funded and copying the pattern. This creates convergence toward a narrow set of models. K-12 outreach, mentoring, public talks, curriculum development. These are fine activities. But they represent maybe ten percent of what's possible.

Exposure. If you've never seen a workforce development board meeting, you don't think of workforce boards as partners. If you've never visited a business incubator, you don't think of entrepreneurship as broader impacts territory. Your partnership imagination is bounded by your experience.

Time pressure. When the deadline is three weeks out, you don't explore creative possibilities. You reach for what's familiar and quick. Generic partnerships are faster to describe than specific ones.

Institutional signals. Some institutions have robust broader impacts support infrastructure. Others don't. If your institution hasn't exposed you to the full range of partnership possibilities, you're working with a limited menu.

The consequence: Broader impacts sections that read like lists of activities rather than integrated strategies. Reviewers see these patterns repeated across proposals. They're not wrong, but they're not distinctive or compelling either.

What if your broader impacts could draw from seven distinct sectors, each with different partnership types, different institutional connectors, and different ways your research could create societal value?

That's what Partnership Idea Sparks is about. Not prescribing what you should do, but expanding what you can imagine.

Here's a quick taste of the range:

Policy. Your water quality research connects to a state environmental quality board that meets monthly and needs technical expertise. You become an advisory member. Your graduate students learn to present research to non-academic audiences. Legislators start knowing your name.

Intra-academic. Your materials science lab partners with a community college two hours away. Students transfer into your program with research experience. Your grad students mentor community college undergrads. An articulation pathway forms that didn't exist before.

Informal science. A regional science center wants to build an exhibit related to your research area. You provide content expertise. They provide exhibit design, audience research, and public engagement experience. Your students help prototype interactive elements and learn science communication in the process.

Industry. A manufacturing company in your region has a quality control challenge your research could address. You structure a partnership where students solve real problems, the company gets solutions, and your lab gets data and relevance.

Workforce development. Your local workforce development board is trying to build STEM career pathways for adults changing careers. Your lab becomes a site for short-term experiential learning. Students serve as mentors. The workforce board handles recruitment and support services.

Entrepreneurship. Your institution's incubator invites you to be a technical advisor for startups in your research area. You connect students with ventures. Some research ideas get tested for commercial potential. The entrepreneurship ecosystem becomes part of your broader impacts story.

Science infrastructure. Your specialized equipment could serve researchers at nearby institutions that lack similar resources. A shared facility agreement creates access, brings new collaborators, and generates publications from unexpected directions.

Each of these sectors has existing institutional infrastructure you can connect to. Each has people at your institution who already know the landscape. Each offers different forms of societal value that NSF reviewers recognize.

Here's the practical difference the imagination problem creates in proposals.

Generic: "The PI will partner with community organizations to broaden participation in STEM."

Specific: "The PI will work with the Central Valley Workforce Investment Board to design a 12-week research experience for career-transitioning adults, building on the Board's existing employer partnerships in advanced manufacturing. Graduate students will serve as near-peer mentors, gaining experience communicating technical concepts to non-traditional learners."

The second version names a partner type, describes a concrete activity, identifies the population, and shows student development. It demonstrates that you've thought about how this actually works, not just that partnerships exist in theory.

Reviewers respond to specificity because specificity signals that you've done the homework. Generic descriptions signal that partnerships are an afterthought

.

Before you write another broader impacts section, ask yourself one question:

What sectors of partnership have I never seriously explored?

Look at the seven sectors: policy, intra-academic, informal science, industry, workforce development, entrepreneurship, and science infrastructure.

How many have you actually investigated for your work? Most faculty, when they're honest, have explored one or two. The imagination problem isn't about capability. It's about exposure.

This Team Guide will walk you through all seven sectors with concrete examples of what partnerships look like in practice. Not abstract frameworks, but real models showing how faculty connected their research to these sectors and what it produced.

If you're working through this with a cohort or team:

Ask your research development office or broader impacts support the single most useful question for breaking the imagination problem:

"What's the most creative partnership you've seen a faculty member build at this institution?"

Then ask the follow-up: "Who was the local connector that helped make it happen?"

The answers will surprise you. Somewhere on your campus, someone has built a partnership model you've never considered. And there's probably a person in your research office, extension service, or community engagement center who helped them get there.

That person can do the same for you. An hour of their time is worth more than weeks of searching on your own. They know the local landscape, the existing relationships, the institutional history, and the contacts who can open doors.

Find them. Ask them. Build with them.

This is Issue 1 of Partnership Idea Sparks, a Team Guide about what partnerships actually look like across seven sectors.

In the issues ahead:

The full Team Guide includes all eight issues plus slide decks for team meetings, interactive decision tools, and downloadable planning templates for each sector.

If you remember nothing else from this issue:

Most faculty aren't bad at partnerships. They're under-exposed to what partnerships can look like. The gap between generic and compelling broader impacts isn't creativity or effort. It's imagination, and imagination expands with exposure.

This guide provides the exposure. Your institution's broader impacts professionals and research development staff provide the local expertise to act on it. Together, those two resources transform how you think about connecting your research to society.