Corporate Philanthropy and Beyond

Abstract:Corporate philanthropy still endures, yet businesses have expanded the nature of their partnerships with higher education over the past 50 years. Companies have responsibilities and demands they are expected to perform to be perceived as ‘good’ and contributing to society in beneficial ways. With public funding declines and competition for tuition dollars, both public and private higher education have become more reliant on corporate resources. The resulting inter-organizational partnerships include corporate engagement such as pro bono work or volunteerism, support for educational resources, sponsored programming, basic as well as applied research, economic development, entrepreneurship, and protection of environmental sustainability. This research note explores these relationships through The Academy-Business Inter-Organizational Partnership Typology (ABIOPT), a framework with four partnership categories: philanthropic, transactional, symbiotic, and synergistic. This model is built on historical perspectives of these partnerships. The research usefulness of the model is explored, including a call to action for more empirical data regarding the inter-organizational relationships between higher education and businesses.