The IE faculty practices many forms of cooperation with working life and business. The foundation may be strategic framework agreements with different partners and thus also with different purposes, such as:  

• Outstanding research and publishing  
• PhD education and supervision 
• Sponsored professorships
• Research infrastructure   
• Strengthen quality and relevance in education 
• Supervision of bachelor’s, master's, and project assignments 
• Mutual technology and knowledge transfer 
• Research collaboration nationally and internationally 
• Mutual mobility, such as secondary positions at NTNU, IIs positions, assistant positions for NTNU employees in business and the public sector 
• Strengthen innovation 
• Strengthen the contracting party's knowledge and competitiveness 
• Develop knowledge and technology that can become new products and services

Other common forms of collaboration are cooperation in national research centres and participation in innovation and research projects financed by NRC or ERC.

There is great breadth to our collaboration with private and public sector. It often centers around working together on continuing and further education, where we offer our expertise in different areas, or co-publishing of scientific articles with members of industry and public sector. At other times, we take part in joint seminars on research, education, and innovation, where we share the latest developments on the research front, while the industry communicates its needs for education and improvement. These are ways we contribute to the dissemination of skills and knowledge.

We have agreements with several actors about sponsored professorships and positions, with the purpose to strengthen research and the education of master's and doctoral students within particular topics. We cooperate in business clusters such as GCE, NCE and Arena to strengthen transfer of competence and dialogue between working life and NTNU. In some test and demonstration projects where IE take part, we can, for example, contribute knowledge in connection with the design of applications. In other projects, our students may be able to perform their bachelor's and master's assignments with some of our established partners.

In other fields, we contribute by establishing new businesses and start-ups, and we have patents and licenses being offered to the business sector. See Available technologies for examples of this. This work usually takes place through NTNU Technology Transfer, also called TTO, which is seen as a strategic tool for commercializing new knowledge.

What we have mentioned above are some of several ways to ensure that knowledge and results from research and innovation at the IE faculty benefit society in the form of new products and services.