NASA Designing a Framework for Agency-Wide Partnerships

The Challenge

NASA collaborates with a vast network of external partners, including other government agencies, commercial space companies, international organizations, and academic institutions. However, there was no standardized, scalable approach to external collaboration, making knowledge-sharing inefficient and inconsistent. Different teams used disconnected tools, ad-hoc processes, and siloed data, creating friction in partnerships and slowing down mission-critical collaboration.

The challenge was to assess, streamline, and improve NASA’s external collaboration capabilities, ensuring that the agency could effectively share knowledge, co-develop research, and engage external stakeholders in a way that was secure, scalable, and aligned with NASA’s long-term strategy. My role was to lead the research, facilitation, and strategy development to define a structured approach to collaboration that reduced barriers and improved alignment across NASA’s divisions and external partners.

The Approach

To address these gaps, I designed and led a multi-month research and facilitation initiative to uncover the pain points and opportunities within NASA’s external collaboration ecosystem. This effort included:

• Conducting in-depth research across NASA’s divisions to map existing collaboration workflows, identify common friction points, and assess security and compliance challenges.
• Facilitating high-stakes workshops with leaders from across NASA to align on a shared vision, define priorities, and establish guiding principles for improving external engagement.
• Developing service blueprints that mapped the full external collaboration lifecycle, from onboarding partners to sharing research and knowledge more effectively.
• Prototyping and testing new models for secure, scalable, and user-friendly external engagement.

This initiative represented NASA’s first agency-wide, structured effort to apply human-centered design and service design methodologies to external collaboration, ensuring that the final recommendations were not just theoretical but actionable and impactful.

The Impact

This work directly informed NASA’s five-year strategy for workforce collaboration services, providing a roadmap for improving external partnerships at scale. The outcomes included:

• A clear, structured framework for external collaboration, reducing inefficiencies and eliminating redundant or siloed processes.
• Better alignment between internal teams and external partners, ensuring that knowledge-sharing was faster, more secure, and more impactful.
• Recommendations that influenced future investments in collaboration tools and policies, improving NASA’s ability to engage with external researchers, agencies, and industry leaders.
• The first agency-wide adoption of co-creative, design thinking practices for external engagement, setting a precedent for future initiatives.

By applying human-centered strategy, facilitation, and ecosystem design, I helped NASA turn a fragmented, inconsistent collaboration model into a structured, scalable system that improved efficiency and strengthened external partnerships.

Why It Matters

NASA’s ability to collaborate effectively with external partners is critical to advancing scientific discovery, mission success, and global innovation. By leading the strategy, research, and facilitation for this initiative, I helped transform NASA’s approach to knowledge-sharing and partnership engagement, ensuring that the agency’s external collaboration strategy is as advanced as the missions it supports.

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