Universities are becoming an increasingly important source of innovation for companies. Universities offer complementary skills, knowledge, and technology to advance research and development resources to their partners, while startups offer disruptive technologies and flexibility to academia. This thesis explores the possibility of cooperation between Codos Foundation, a Swiss startup tackling pollution arising from commuting, and the FHNW.

Extensive literature review and interviews with key stakeholders were conducted during the research to answer questions such as: Why and how do industry players, including startups and large companies, engage in partnerships with academic institutions? What modes of collaboration would be most relevant and beneficial for Codos Foundation and FHNW? What are the critical success factors, and who are the key stakeholders?

The paper concludes that there are three potential ways in which Codos Foundation and the FHNW can cooperate: cross-promotional marketing, student projects, and joint research. The specific cooperation model developed by this paper is based on integration cross-promotion. Codos app is to be integrated into the FHNW infrastructure. This app can be used as a foundation for student competitions, various analyses, research papers, etc. Furthermore, these competitions and papers can grant students learning or academic points and serve as the basis for joint publications and research between Codos Foundation and the FHNW. Both sides can benefit in several ways, from gaining access to new resources, to improving their reputation. Both respective sides in this partnership will have to devote various resources to make the cooperation successful. These resources are divided by key success factors, namely: Institutional factors, relationship factors, output factors, and framework factors. In order to start this cooperation, Codos Foundation has to approach the leads of different institutes at FHNW, program heads, and professors to find the best way of the app’s implementation.