For almost four years, Omar Asensio and his colleagues have been studying the impact of federal energy programs on low-income neighborhoods.
The intersection of technology—artificial intelligence, in particular—and public policy has long been an area of focus for Asensio, a visiting fellow with the Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS) at Harvard Business School. When the team’s research was published in Nature Sustainability in March, one organization watching closely was Esri, a geographic information system (GIS) software company. The firm helped sponsor the project and its software was used extensively.
While many companies support academic research, Esri embraces the role like few others. The company has roots at Harvard University and now works with more than 6,500 colleges and universities worldwide, using academic projects to evaluate real-world applications, develop product enhancements, recruit expert personnel and showcase new uses for its platform.
“It’s a very cost effective approach to get real innovation,” Andrew Turner, director of Esri’s R&D Center in Washington, DC, says. “You can invest where you see opportunities that you want to drive and get early access to some of those innovations.”
Mapping insights for social good
In many cases, these projects help bring about societal change. Asensio, who is an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his work offer a good example.
Asensio and his team examined the impact of federal housing block grants on energy-efficient housing, specifically on low-income neighborhoods in Albany, Georgia, a city of roughly 69,000 people about 200 miles south of Atlanta.
Making residential neighborhoods more energy efficient is essential to meeting national energy efficiency goals and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For years, the federal government has offered programs, but participation lagged in low-income neighborhoods.
Asensio’s team discovered that community development block grants from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which aim to improve housing—but don’t directly target energy efficiency—nevertheless make homes more energy efficient and increase participation among low- and moderate-income households.
“This is a relatively untapped opportunity for driving energy efficiency.”
The programs generated long-run energy savings of up to 11 percent, which translates to hundreds of dollars a year per family—enough to cover the cost of up to two months of groceries in some households.
“We ended up finding very significant hidden social benefits from these policies that were previously unknown,” Asensio said.
The research could have major implications for local, state and federal policymakers who want to increase energy efficiency while improving neighborhoods and helping families.
“There are thousands and thousands of communities that look very much like Albany,” Asensio said. “This is a relatively untapped opportunity for driving energy efficiency.”
The project also helped ESRI, which does extensive business with governments at every level. The project brought academia, government, and the community together using ESRI software. Turner says that Asensio’s research allowed the company to test its product, while yielding a repeatable exercise.
“He’s not just someone who went and wrote a bunch of equations, they actually also wrote code in our software,” Turner says. “We can easily pivot that back out to scale across the world.”
Lessons from academic partnership
ESRI participates in a broad range of academic projects, from funding research to endowing university chairs. Turner says the company has learned a great deal from years of academic collaboration. Here are some of those lessons:
- Survey the landscape. Turner says it pays for leaders to do research up front and discover what’s already happening in the academic world that could benefit their companies. “Academia is a research and development arm that we don’t have to directly pay for,” he says. “You can survey the landscape for free.”
- Think small. Successful collaboration often starts by pairing an individual, a team, or a department within the company with an academic partner. Whole-company initiatives are more complicated.
- Identify local opportunities. Partnering with a local institution can allow for closer relationships and better collaboration. “Think about how you might get multiple benefits for your investment,” Turner says. “You’re building your community, you’re getting the research and the recruiting arm, and you can get marketing in the community as well.”
- Consider the cycle. The timelines in academia can differ from those in the corporate world. Turner says they often look for projects that can be delivered in a year or two. “We really want to avoid ill-defined, abstract, ambiguous, and long-term things without a clear goal,” he says.
- Invest in people. Success in academic partnerships is as much about the people involved as it is about the institutions. “It’s like investing in a startup,” Turner says. “You have to think, who are the people? What are they working on? What’s the motivation?”
- Put costs in perspective. One smart way to gauge investment is to calculate the cost to hire internal personnel to do similar work. When salaries, benefits, and other costs are tallied, academic partnership is sometimes cheaper.
- Follow through. Successful partnerships are about more than publishing research. Savvy companies draw lessons from the project, such as product enhancements or new use cases. As Turner put it, “It’s back on us as a company to leverage that, pull it back into our work to get the value.”
This article first appeared in The BiGS Fix.
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