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How can universities leverage abundant thinking to unlock transformative external partnerships, and what does it take to prepare students for the messiness of the modern workplace? We talk through these with Lesley-Ann Noel the Dean of Design at OCAD. Together, we explore how experiential learning bridges the gap between the classroom and career, how to manage internal collaboration across functions, and why establishing clear project constraints and intentional team roles enables sustainable innovation and lasting student success across higher education.
How Industry Partnerships Drive Student Success in Higher Education
Colleges and universities around the world are navigating tight budgets, shifting demographics, and growing skepticism around the value of a degree. In response to these headwinds, academic leaders frequently default to a scarcity mindset. They cut programs, pull back initiatives, and manage decline.
What happens when institutions pivot toward abundant thinking?
As Lesley-Ann Noel, Dean of Design at OCAD University, shared on the Connected College podcast with host Elliot Felix, looking at institutional challenges through a lens of abundance unlocks unexpected collaboration. Instead of operating within rigid campus borders, institutions can cultivate multi-faceted industry partnerships that enrich the curriculum, expand student opportunities, and prepare graduates for an unpredictable workforce.
Moving Beyond the Misconceptions of External Partnerships
When university leaders talk about external collaboration, traditional fears often surface. Faculty worry that corporate sponsors will dictate degree requirements, while administrators fear losing academic autonomy.
Authentic collaboration is not transactional; it is deeply relational. When higher education institutions engage with external organizations, both parties learn together. The process is inherently emergent. A project may start with a defined brief, but the real educational breakthroughs occur when unexpected challenges surface during execution.
Another persistent misconception is the very definition of the term industry. It is easy to assume partnering requires signing deals with multinational corporations or tech giants. In practice, impactful collaboration spans a far wider spectrum, including:
Community neighborhood groups and local non-profits
Public healthcare institutions and regional hospitals
Municipal school districts and civic agencies
Independent retailers and regional manufacturers
Broadening this definition ensures students engage with partners that reflect the full fabric of society.
Elevating Experiential Learning Through Real-World Complexity
Textbook assignments and simulated classroom exercises are neat and tidy. The modern workplace is decidedly not.
Integrating external partners directly into coursework through experiential learning exposes students to the healthy ambiguity of professional practice. Students quickly discover how to:
Navigate unaligned stakeholder feedback: Learning to interpret conflicting guidance across a table is a core professional skill that cannot be mastered in a theoretical vacuum.
Read non-verbal cues: Evaluating human nuance, body language, and vague encouragement prepares learners for client presentations far better than interacting solely with familiar professors.
Navigate institutional bureaucracy: In complex projects—such as OCAD students designing support systems for hospital patients with dementia—students learn firsthand about regulatory compliance, vaccination requirements, and institutional protocols before ever setting foot on site.
These touchpoints bridge the gap between classroom theory and career readiness, turning abstract concepts into practical agency.
Structuring the Institution to Support Sustainable Collaboration
Managing a robust portfolio of external engagements cannot fall entirely on individual instructors. Without dedicated scaffolding, programs risk spreading themselves too thin.
At OCAD, balancing high ambition with operational realities relies on relational leadership and strategic constraints. Rather than attempting to pursue dozens of disparate initiatives, leadership focuses attention on a defined set of high-impact core projects. This discipline prevents administrative whiplash and keeps faculty from burning out.
Furthermore, building an interconnected institution requires intentional coordination between internal divisions:
Faculty Program Offices: Ensuring external work maps cleanly to pedagogical outcomes.
Centers for Career and Creative Development: Handling employer-facing placements, internships, and co-op streams.
Alumni Relations and Advancement: Maintaining continuity of institutional messaging and re-engaging graduates as industry collaborators.
Advisory Councils: Establishing sector-specific councils across distinct degree programs to anticipate where future careers are heading.
Reframing Group Dynamics to Boost Career Readiness
Student satisfaction surveys regularly reveal a stark truth: group work is consistently rated among the least popular aspects of the student experience. K-12 education largely rewards solo achievement, meaning students often arrive at postsecondary institutions without the foundational tools required for successful collaboration.
When students are placed in teams without clear infrastructure, projects flounder. Introducing live partners acts as a powerful forcing function for team design. Students are compelled to clarify roles, assign responsibilities based on individual strengths, and appoint evaluators who keep timelines intact. By learning to navigate team tensions while delivering on an external brief, students develop the social and strategic stamina needed for lifelong career achievement.
Unlocking Abundance for the Future of Higher Education
Higher education does not need to accept an endless cycle of doing more with less. By shifting from scarcity to abundance, universities can leverage their most vital assets—their physical spaces, their intellectual capital, and their convening power. Building genuine, emergent partnerships across local and regional communities creates an educational model that connects learners directly to the world they are preparing to lead.
Episode 132 Transcript
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Lesley-Ann Noel: I think in the university context, it is important for us to think abundantly because all over the world higher education is constrained and we are facing these barriers, whether it's in budgets or people try to limit what we can do. I've found that abundant thinking actually opens up the possibilities much more. And this abundant thinking has resulted in different partnerships, right?
Elliot Felix: That was Lesley-Ann Noel, Dean of Design at OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design. We had a fascinating conversation about how students there work with industry partners across a range of activities. These might be sponsored studios, live projects, collaborative research, internships, co-ops, and more. We also talked through the benefits for students, like responding to feedback and adapting to uncertainty, and the communication and the coordination needed to make this all work seamlessly. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Lesley-Ann, I'm so excited for our conversation about industry partnerships and learning from all the great stuff you're doing at OCAD, and how these enable student success.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Great, Elliot. I'm looking forward to this conversation as well.
Elliot Felix: Tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today.
Lesley-Ann Noel: I got into higher ed almost as soon as I finished undergrad, which was literally like a series of strange coincidences. I walked into a university office on the day that the Portuguese lecturer had left, and I speak Portuguese, and people were just kinda looking around and scrambling, saying, "Okay, who's gonna teach this class now?" And I'm like, "I speak Portuguese." So I actually got into higher education right place, right time as a language instructor even though my background is in design. And then there was a second coincidence where I went to an event on campus and I met the head of the visual arts program. It was a social event, and he asked, "What are you doing on campus?" And I said, "I teach Portuguese." And he says, "But aren't you a designer?" And I said, "Yes." "So shouldn't you be teaching with us?"
Elliot Felix: Both can be true at the same time.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Yes! And so this professor invited me to teach in the visual arts program at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, and that started my higher ed journey. I was always interested in education. Some people go to university and they know they want to be university professors. I was in practice first and then ended up tweaking my career to university education.
Elliot Felix: And you've worked in a lot of amazing places in addition to University of the West Indies: Tulane, NC State, and now what are you up to at OCAD?
Lesley-Ann Noel: So I'm at OCAD University. That's Ontario College of Art and Design. OCAD is our name officially these days. And I'm the Dean of Design, the Dean of the Faculty of Design at OCAD. I have to say, of course, that we are celebrating our 150th anniversary. And I don't know any other art and design university that's celebrating 150 years. Maybe there are others, but I'm very proud to be the Dean of Design at this time because we have a long history in art and design education in Canada.
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Elliot Felix: Yeah, and very broad impact, which I think is pretty great. And I know a lot of the way that you have that impact and that reach is you do a fantastic job of working with companies and community groups and working on projects and sponsored studios and such. I feel like this is something a lot of institutions misunderstand or struggle with. What do you think folks get wrong about institutional industry partnerships?
Lesley-Ann Noel: I think that there are sometimes wrong ideas on both sides. On the faculty side, or maybe even the student side, on the university side sometimes there is the misconception that the industry partner will be driving our curriculum, right? And so maybe one big misconception is that one side is going to have much more power than the other, when really for the partnerships to work well, we have to understand it's a relationship, right? The university stakeholders are learning with the partners.
Elliot Felix: And vice versa, exactly.
Lesley-Ann Noel: The industry partner learns with the university stakeholders. We need really vibrant groups of students and faculty and then a partner. And then we do have to understand that the relationship is going to be maybe a little bit more fluid than they might expect. So we might draw out a plan, but it's a work in progress and we know that the actual path might not follow the linear plan that we've outlined, right?
Elliot Felix: So sometimes one misconception is you can figure it all out, but in fact probably some of the best partnerships are more emergent, where you're figuring it out together, not in advance, and things change, and you discover things.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Yes, exactly. Emergent was the word I was looking for, that the path actually sometimes emerges as we're doing the work. So we'll have a brief, but in a better partnership, yes, some other things might come up to the surface in the partnership, and that's where everybody starts learning, and that's when things get really exciting, actually.
Elliot Felix: I also think, not to get too meta, but I think that's also just great preparation for students too, because I've probably done 400-something design strategy projects, strategic plans, org designs, operating models, and they never finish the way you thought they would at the start, right? There's always some discovery, there's always some opportunity. I think that's part of the design process, right?
Lesley-Ann Noel: Exactly. That is part of the design process. For us, this is really what we're looking for, where everybody is learning in the process. Maybe another misconception is around who is industry, right? Sometimes among the stakeholders who I support within the university, I sometimes have to reiterate that industry sometimes is like a shorthand that we're using, but it doesn't just mean corporate. We're not just working with big tech. Industry could be other things.
Elliot Felix: Could be a church, right?
Lesley-Ann Noel: Exactly. Yeah. So we do have some partnerships with some hospitals. We have some partnerships with some consumer products manufacturers and retailers. But we might also have a partnership with a community group from a neighborhood, or with the school district. And sometimes all of these people we could be calling industry. But when we're thinking about partnerships, we're not thinking of only one kind of partner because we do want our designers to go out and serve all levels of society with a wide range of partner expertise. And if we only recruit one type of industry partner, we won't get that. The reality is many designers go off and do pro bono work, go off and support community groups, and the design student is always learning from all of these partnerships, and we warmly welcome them in our curriculum at OCAD.
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Elliot Felix: I love that it's not one way. Everybody's learning together. It's not linear, and it's not just companies. It's much more than that. So it's emergent and it's expansive. On your website, you have this wonderful menu of the ways that people can partner, which I feel like is another misconception. Sometimes it's just not very concrete about how could we work together, and you lay it all out. It's lectures, it's sponsored studios, it's internships and co-ops, it's live projects, it's portfolio reviews and mentoring, it's joint research, design competitions, hackathons, advisory boards. It's technology and resource sharing. There's initiatives, there's networking. How does this enable student success? What's the impact on students, for students, with students?
Lesley-Ann Noel: It's almost overwhelming hearing you talk about it like that with all of the things.
Elliot Felix: It's like there's 11 amazing things on the menu. It's a good problem to have.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Yes. Actually, part of why we lay it out like that is so that people can see it is a relationship. When an industry partner reaches out, whether they reach out to me or to our center for supporting art and design, it's good for partners to know that this is a conversation and a relationship that we're trying to build. We're trying to figure out where along the way we embed this partner experience. Is it in curriculum, like within a course, or is it extracurricular where the partner might be sponsoring a student group, or is it a work-integrated learning opportunity or student placement? There are all of these points where the partnership can happen and where the students can benefit. And so the effect on students is that learning to build that relationship with partners very early helps them to understand things like how to create good briefs. Students learn very early about the complexity that is life in our world of design when they are dealing with partners. Because without the partner, sometimes the classroom brief can seem very clean and organized. Sometimes when we introduce that partner, it does change the dynamic and it prepares people more effectively for the world of work, including the complexity that is work. Understanding the nuances of feedback. Understanding the differences of opinion among a team. Bringing in an external partner brings a level of realness to the class that is difficult to simulate without a partner. It just means that our students are more prepared for the world of actual work or even the world of research later on because they can deal with greater complexity because of these external relationships.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, facing a client who's not aligned is great training, right? When you get differing feedback around the room, across the table, and you muddle your way through that and figure out what you should actually do. That takes years, maybe decades to master that skill, and getting exposure to that early is incredibly important.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Exactly. Or even trying to understand when someone is giving you positive feedback, but it's vague. Or having this real person in the room and having to read their body language in a way that you might not have to read your professor's body language. All of these things are just really important. So some of the work that I'm trying to do in my role as dean is to make sure that we do in fact have more of these real-life touchpoints for students. Whether it's in the curriculum, where this partner relationship is built around a classroom activity, or if it's extracurricular, like providing opportunities for talks or charrettes among student clubs. It just changes the learning to students' benefit. In my own design education we didn't have industry in the classroom, but we sometimes went and did factory visits. That's something that I would like to increase a little bit more at OCAD. And then, when I left design school, I started my own business immediately, and I made such expensive mistakes. I'm trying to create some moments for people to have other real conversations before they get off into the world of work. These are some of the things that we're just very interested in right now.
Elliot Felix: I would love to hear some examples. Can we spotlight a few of these projects so listeners get a feel for the great things you're working on?
Lesley-Ann Noel: We have quite a few partnerships in health. We do work with a few hospitals. I'm thinking right now of one partnership we have with a hospital where we were working on design to support people with dementia. The students got a really good understanding of even things like the complexity of getting into a hospital. A whole lot of students had to get vaccinated. There was a lot of prep work that had to happen for students to get into the hospital which no one would have thought of before. They probably had no idea of the bureaucracy that runs behind a hospital. In this kind of conversation, students have to understand patients' needs better. There are a lot of interviews that they had to do with patients, with medical staff, and then they had to do their external research outside. That hospital project is ongoing, and that one is pretty successful. We do have a new relationship with a retailer where they come to our class, and they're working with students throughout the term. In that one, students will get feedback from the retailer on their design throughout. The retailer would have presented the brief to them, and then they have to elaborate the designs and get feedback throughout. There was another retailer that visited our jewelry design students at several points during one term, and they wanted to share with students more about how do you build a jewelry collection? How do you understand the materials? How do you get an idea of what the customers are looking for? In that one, the buyer from the retailer came to class quite a few times to talk with students. We have many other examples. I think that health is the place where we're doing most of our work. Many of our courses have a touchpoint with health. We actually have a Design for Health master's program. And then several of our undergrad courses, environmental design and industrial design in particular, also have touchpoints with health as well. And then our strategic foresight and innovation group also end up speaking with people in health quite a bit as well.
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Elliot Felix: These projects look and feel different than they might otherwise in terms of working with these partners and having all this to manage—vaccines to get, access to grant, and fieldwork to do. I'm wondering how you organize yourself internally to facilitate that. What changes did you have to make in your own organization and operations to make that happen?
Lesley-Ann Noel: Maybe it's what do we still need to change? I have to think like that because the Faculty of Design at OCAD is a pretty big faculty. We have almost 3,000 students and about 70 faculty members. Our faculty office is actually quite small, and the faculty office manages the programs across the six undergrad programs that we run. It really is that our professors are our most valuable asset. They are the ones who are doing some of the management of these industry partnerships. In my role as dean, the dean is often a very visible role, and so industry partners reach out to me as well. They reach out to faculty members, and they reach out to our Center for Emerging Artists and Designers. That center is actually external to our faculty, and so if we're dealing with job placements, the Center for Emerging Artists tends to deal with that. If it is around faculty research, it would either be me in my role as dean or an interested faculty member who wants to do work with them, and then we'll direct the work to where it needs to go within the organization. But in my role, I tend to be inviting the conversations in. We are about to create some industry advisory councils for four of our programs, and so we hope that will be another way of us getting more opportunities with industries in. The four programs where we'll be creating these councils are maybe more industry-focused, so advertising, environmental design, industrial design, and graphic design. We hope to just be having more conversations with industry about where some of these opportunities and the future of these careers are going. We will also be creating some co-op streams in some of our programs. It's some new work that we're doing where we are building more structured opportunities for students within several of our streams.
Elliot Felix: And how do you coordinate and connect the dots between the center, your career development and placement, and alumni relations? Because you've got all these folks whose job it is to build and manage relationships and make connections, and I feel like that's something that maybe every institution struggles with, connecting those dots.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Elliot, you're asking me difficult questions. But okay, so I think relationally, and I create the strategies in a relational way. I know within the Faculty of Design the kind of strategy we want and the kinds of relationships we want, and then I have to see who else supports us in doing this work. You named alumni relations. That meant all of September I was liaising with alumni relations so I could reach out with them and say, "Okay, here's our message for this term." We got the alumni letter out, and then I could focus on my relationships between CEAD and our co-op stream. CEAD is our Center for Emerging Artists and Designers. It really means that I am always looking at these relationships around the university as well as external relationships, and I'm very often trying to think, "Okay, who do we need to be talking with about what?" And then I'm always assessing, are we actually having enough conversation to get the results done? I have a specific number of projects that I tell everyone in the team, "This is what we're looking at," because projects can amplify and spread you thin. People will come with new projects all the time, and I will try to bring it back to, "Okay, here are our seven. How do these conversations tie with the current seven projects that we're looking at?" I'm a designer, and I always have paper, and I'm drawing and thinking through all of these complex relationships and trying to make sure that we have something to show at the end for the different relationships.
Elliot Felix: It sounds to me like a key part of it is for you to connect up and join up the conversations, and then for you to clarify and constrain the number of projects so you can actually do something. That's one of the big ideas in The Connected College: instead of this endless cycle of do more with less, it's focus so you can do less with more, and focus your resources on fewer things, on seven projects, whatever it is, instead of spreading it across 17.
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Lesley-Ann Noel: I was visiting two universities in Brazil, and in one of the classes I visited, the professor spoke very explicitly about abundant thinking versus scarcity mindset. And I've been thinking about how that affects the way that I show up for these conversations, the way I show up in the world. Because I do think abundantly. I try to not embrace scarcity mindsets or ways of doing things. I think that thinking abundantly creates more opportunities. But that actually is also why I sometimes have to constrain myself, because I'm always thinking, "Oh, we could turn this into an opportunity." But in the university context, it is important for us to think abundantly because all over the world higher education is constrained and we are facing these barriers, whether in budgets or people trying to limit what we can do. I've found that abundant thinking actually opens up the possibilities much more. And this abundant thinking has resulted in different partnerships. You had asked me a little bit earlier about collaboration. Another form of collaboration we have been doing is with industry organizations. Actually, this week we're hosting a professional meeting for several professional organizations. That again is driven by this abundant thinking where we do have the space, we do have the resources. We might not have money, but we have other resources that we can bring to conversations, and then that just generates goodwill and leads to other possibilities as well.
Elliot Felix: Right. Part of your value can be as a convener of these conversations. I can totally relate because having a design background and then becoming a leader is maybe a blessing and a curse. Having to think expansively and abundantly, but at the same time recognize that you may have limited time or resources, is always a challenge. I remember distinctly having to learn as a designer that I always wanted to change everything at once. Because I could see how everything was connected: if we're going to change how we write proposals, we might as well change how we create invoices, and we might as well change how we resource people to projects. But I quickly learned that your team gets whiplash if you're changing everything at once. You have to figure out how to stage things and constrain things and clarify things. I think the design toolkit is an amazing resource and asset for leadership, but sometimes it comes with some downsides if you get too expansive or abundant.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Actually, yes. Now, one way of managing that, which maybe you have already picked up, is that I do need one or two people on the team who will press the brakes, right? There are a few people within my team who know that I will probably embrace all the ideas, and their role is in fact to ask me some questions that might slow me down.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. When my company, Brightspot, was around 10 people, we had an amazing leadership coach, Winnie DaSilva, and one of the assessments she ran was Belbin team roles, looking at who can play which role on a team. One of the roles was called monitor evaluator. Those are the pump-the-brakes people that you very much need. We mapped out the team, and out of a dozen people, we had one person who could be a monitor evaluator. It was very illuminating to realize where you have gaps and how you need to balance things out to be successful. I imagine that applies to partnerships as well, where you're trying to design the teams and the roles to make it effective.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Yes, absolutely. Even that becomes a benefit of doing partnership role work with students in small groups, because students also can work out who in the team really is appropriate for what role. Even in the future that might be something that you may see more and more people in education talk about: the importance of group work and moving away from individual work because, again, it is a practice for life after university.
Elliot Felix: And I could see industry projects having a great kind of forcing function for team design and role design in a way that you might not otherwise have to do. There is greater clarity if it's a group project with a client. And that's often a huge pain point for students. I've been doing a national student experience survey roughly every couple years for the last six or seven years, and of the 60-plus dimensions of student experience, group work is the lowest satisfaction every time. Part of that is not working on these amazing projects with real clients like you're doing, but part of it is also that there isn't the infrastructure and the scaffolding around the roles and the team design. It's throwing everybody into the project deep end without assigning the roles.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Poor students. Group work will always have the lowest satisfaction, but working well in groups is a skill that you actually do have to learn. In all of our primary school and secondary school, we're often doing individual projects. Most of us don't get to university with that skill of understanding how to work with others, and we don't get to the world of work with that skill. As much as people hate group work, that's really important. It's one of those skills that people have to learn, as much as they hate it.
Elliot Felix: Hard stuff is good for you. I'm a firm believer. Lesley-Ann, thank you for an amazing conversation about industry partnerships and leadership and so much more.
Lesley-Ann Noel: Thank you for the invitation.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to elliotfelix.com for more information about my book, The Connected College, articles I've written, and talks I've given. There are also tools you can download, information on upcoming events, and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.