IDEA-DR Partnership Overview

The IDEA Design Research (IDEA-DR) Fellowship is a structured innovation program that connects interdisciplinary student teams with partners to solve complex, real-world challenges through human-centered design. To date, IDEA-DR has engaged over 190 students in delivering high-value insights and solutions, including user research reports, low-fidelity prototypes, digital tools, and strategic service blueprints. Our teams have leveraged design research to address diverse topics, such as health equity, environmental sustainability, food security, and community revitalization. These projects have been championed by partners across government, industry, and non-profits, including NASA, Merck, Colgate, the NJ Economic Development Authority, and Unity Square Community Center.

Design research projects are the challenges that teams focus on in our program. We created a template for partner organizations to submit ideas for IDEA-DR projects, allowing you to propose pressing challenges in need of cross-disciplinary innovation. 

A good IDEA-DR project focuses on a compelling problem or strategic goal that tells a human story, is reasonable enough in scope that design research and validated concepts could make a dent in it, but broad enough that there is room for student teams to be creative and develop a diverse set of insights and prototype directions. Projects also have the most success when there is access to key stakeholders and some data available to address the problem.

This year, we’re holding an open call for IDEA-DR projects beginning in December 2025. We will review topics on a rolling basis, and all projects will be approved by May 2026. Our preference is to develop a project topic that aligns directly with your organization's specific strategic goals, mission, and values. If a custom project topic is not immediately clear, we have identified four broad themes to consider: Health Technology and Public Health, Environmental Sustainability, FinTech, and Community Engagement/Social Well-being.

Please avoid prescribing specific solutions to the student teams. Instead, frame a general challenge to allow the student teams to develop their problem solving skills. Finally, we prefer to work with publicly available data or data sets that can be anonymized, but if your project requires access to company data or confidential information, we can work with your legal team on an appropriate Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to facilitate access.

The organizations who have the best experience and outcomes in this process have identified an employee who has support and bandwidth to meet with IDEA administrators ahead of the program to scope the project; and meet with the participating student team on a weekly basis during the 10-week program. We also find organizations are most successful when they are open-minded about possible project outcomes, and willing to think creatively about solutions identified through the design research process.

To propose a topic, please download the proposal template document and submit to idea.hatchery@rutgers.edu with subject line “Fellowship Topic Proposal”.