Designing for academic-industry social innovation: Connecting theory to practice

Despite significant investments and efforts, the demonstrated advancement of global health equity remains aspirational and challenging. While cross-sectoral partnerships that include academic institutions, industry, and community stakeholders to advance health equity have been widely recommended, such partnerships remain underutilized despite their ability to drive multi-level sustained social change. This study explores cross-sector partnership potential to facilitate social innovation in health, particularly through experiential learning designs that empower underrepresented students as change agents. This research includes three phases: First, it uses interviews of academic and industry practitioners collaborating on health equity projects to explore 1) how structured cross-sector collaborations are best developed and maintained to address partnership challenges while advancing health equity and 2) what elements are critical in developing a sustainable social change model. From this work, the Partner for Social Change Model is developed. Additionally, it presents a case study to illustrate the practical application of this multi-phase partnership model to demonstrate the model in action. Lastly, it explores the role of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools in enhancing these efforts, specifically how NLP tools can be used to facilitate the partnering phases of the social change model developed in Phase 1. As such, this study utilizes a mixed-methods approach, incorporating qualitative interviews, participatory action research that the author led in an experiential learning case study, and experimental data using NLP tools like ChatGPT. The findings demonstrate that structured cross-sector collaboration can engage in a systematic approach to align diverse goals, leading to impactful social innovation and health equity advancements. These findings also highlight the potential of NLP tools to be valuable in partnership development, enhancing strategic alignment, decision-making, and overall model effectiveness. This research contributes to understanding how cross-sectoral partnerships can be designed and implemented to address systemic health disparities, underscoring the importance of its findings.