NOAA Regional Public Private Partnership Analysis and Recommended Strategy

Abstract

In this project, our project team is working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Regional Collaboration team to identify potential public-private partnership opportunities in the Great Lakes region. The end goal of this project is to provide NOAA with deliverables that include a recommendation list of partner organizations in the Great Lakes and a methodology rubric that specifies the criteria we used to determine the recommended organizations. Through this project, we hope to help inform NOAA decision-makers on future collaborations that support the impactful and efficient use of federal funds in Great Lakes region, and ensure that federal investments are cost effective and NOAA is meeting end user needs through provisions of its data, products, and services. In order to generate a recommendation list of partner organizations to submit to NOAA, we used a variety of research methods in this project. Methods include literature review, interviews and criteria evaluation. From our research, we were able to learn important information, such as NOAA’s current capabilities and partnership needs in the Great Lakes region, as well as key components of public-private partnerships that have been successful in the past. We also identified the key environmental issues and potential collaboration topics in which future NOAA partnerships would be most beneficial. These potential collaboration topics include invasive species, harmful algal blooms, green infrastructure, customized weather service, coastal navigation, coastal management, habitat conservation and economic development in the Great Lakes region. Based on these issues and topics, we found many potential partners. We divided these partners into 6 categories, which are industries, foundations, coastal management, education, restoration, and conservation. For each category, we defined a specialized methodology criterion to help evaluate partners. Using our specialized methodology criteria, we evaluated the partners on our list for each category and generated an overall score for each organization.