Building collaborative engagement
The Office of Business Partnerships at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business creates and provides solutions to the business challenges of today and the future.
Dedicated Daniels School professionals streamline opportunities for industry partners and alumni to connect with students and faculty beyond the traditional classroom setting. The partnerships office helps companies solve business challenges through consulting-focused experiential learning projects across all business functions via course-based engagements or contracts with our centers.
Applying the power of data to serve industry needs is in the Office of Business Partnerships’ DNA. Moving beyond theory into real problem-solving is a call to action our office takes seriously. We understand organizations large and small face uncertainty, rapid technological changes and the continuous need to train employees and cultivate new talent.
Let’s get started, together.
TOP 8
Public University in the U.S.
QS World University, 2025
TOP 10
Most Innovative Schools in the U.S.
7 Years Running
U.S. News & World Report, 2025
BRANDS THAT MATTER
For the 4th year in a row, Purdue is the only university on Fast Company’s Brands That Matter list.
There are so many ways we can work together to create and nurture a rewarding partnership that benefits your organization. Explore the opportunities that make up the core of a strategic partnership with Purdue and the Daniels School.
Enhance your organization's leadership capacity by investing in their development through a residential, online or hybrid degree program, certificate courses or a custom offering.
Collaborate with our centers of excellence and expert faculty researchers to gain access to top thought leadership.
Develop future team members while filling your most challenging positions. Your next hire could be that talented intern, a stellar full-time candidate or a transformational executive you meet through a tailored recruitment strategy designed for your company.
Join forces with our expert faculty and top students to create a consulting project that will define and test solutions for your pain points.
Drive industry and academic innovation through board membership, mentoring, guest lectures and curricular guidance.
Quantifying energy grid load by geography is extremely challenging since the grid is more akin to an undirected graph network than a clearly defined set of start and end points. In other words, electrons are not tracked directly from the generator to the customer connection. This black box effect makes accurately forecasting grid behavior (such as swings in demand, load, surplus, etc.) challenging, particularly when it is desirable to forecast realistic behavior in a focused region (ex., by zip code).
The industry partner has approached this previously by leveraging an eXtreme Gradient Boosting algorithm (XGBoost) trained on energy market data for a region of interest to regress against outputs from PLEXOS (an energy grid simulation tool), using price as a surrogate for a demand metric. Applicable time scales for prediction: next minute, next half hour, next hour, next 24 hours, next week, next month, next year.
Proposed Methodology: Leverage open-source algorithms like (S)ARIMA(X), XGBoost, Meta’s Prophet, ETS, and relevant neural network architectures like RNN, LSTM, or Transformers to simulate and predict energy.
The Partner operates locations that temporarily close during summer and academic breaks. While locations must maintain sufficient inventory to serve customers until closure dates, excess inventory at the end of each operating period results in both financial losses and product waste. The Partner sought to develop an improved inventory wind-down process that balances sales opportunities with responsible inventory management to reduce waste and improve financial performance.
The organization sought to improve the early talent relocation experience across multiple U.S. locations, particularly non-flagship sites. Interns and early career hires often relocate to unfamiliar or rural areas, creating uncertainty during the offer decision process and limiting early connection, engagement and sense of belonging. These challenges can impact offer acceptance, onboarding readiness, employer branding and long-term retention.
Academic and industry partnerships bring together the best of industry-specific and cutting-edge business knowledge to craft new and innovative ideas.
Mike Pettit
Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Wabash
Read the full story about our collaborative partnership with Wabash.
When we explore different avenues through what the students help us understand, that opens up new ways of solving the problems that we face.
Dave Teeter
Vice President of Talent and Organizational Effectiveness, Wabash
What's really impressed me is [the students are] clearly getting a lot of training very early on. They’re well prepared for what's going to be required of them as they move from the academic world into the business world.
Michael Day
Executive Director, Engine Business Segment, Off-Highway Finance, Cummins
