Vanderbilt University and Nissan North America have built a sustained collaboration focused on exploring complex design and innovation challenges through applied, human-centered inquiry. Over time, the partnership has evolved into a working model for how industry and academia can learn together while addressing real-world systems and constraints.
This collaboration is anchored in the Innovation Collaboration Program (ICP), at the Wond’ry, Vanderbilt’s Center for Innovation, Making & Design, which is designed to support organizations in examining complex problems through structured discovery rather than predefined solutions. Projects are scoped to the partnering organization’s goals and timelines and emphasize rigorous problem framing, empirical insight generation, and iterative exploration.
A defining element of ICP is its integration with the Vanderbilt Innovation Fellowship (VIF), a selective, interdisciplinary, Wond’ry-sponsored program that embeds students directly into industry-facing project teams. Fellows work under the guidance of Wond’ry faculty and mentors, gaining hands-on experience in design research, synthesis, collaboration, and stakeholder communication through applied work.
Nissan North America has participated in ICP since 2022, building on a longer relationship with Vanderbilt University. Throughout the partnership, Nissan teams have engaged with interdisciplinary student groups to explore innovation strategy, user experience, and system-level design questions within automotive contexts.
“This relationship has flourished because it’s grounded in trust and shared curiosity,” said Dave Owens, Owens Family Executive Director of the Wond’ry. “The structure of ICP allows partners like Nissan to step outside day-to-day pressures and explore questions that don’t always fit neatly into traditional development cycles.”
In February 2026, the collaboration reached a new milestone with a live, on-campus design research event known as a “rapid discovery blitz.” The activity brought together Vanderbilt Innovation Fellows and Nissan product and digital teams for a focused examination of automotive interface design by staging a fleet of eight vehicles on Vanderbilt’s campus for event participants to provide real-time responses to the different vehicles’ features.
Rather than evaluating individual vehicles or proposing immediate solutions, the blitz examined broader interaction patterns related to driver attention, cognitive load, and recovery following interruption in safety-critical driving contexts. The goal was to uncover insights and tradeoffs that could inform future vehicle design decisions and deeper exploration.
For Nissan collaborators, the engagement offered an opportunity to step back from familiar systems and examine them through a different lens.
“It’s very engaging to see how interested the students were in our cars and how quickly they grasp the user experience challenges,” shared a Nissan digitalization leader. “They asked questions that helped us reflect on design decisions we don’t always have time to examine.”
For students, the experience reinforced the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. Alison Zou (School of Engineering, Class of 2027) a Vanderbilt Innovation Fellow and double major in Art and Engineering, described how working across disciplines reshaped her approach to problem-solving.
“Working with people from different majors allows you to use an engineering mindset as your strength, while seeing where you feel less strong —like a commercial mindset,” Alison said. “I was working with another fellow from an opposite major, and while I was thinking about quantitative numbers, they were asking about how people’s opinions function in the system. It really changes the game for you.”
Sean McNamara, a member of the Wond’ry Mentor Program and an automotive industry professional, views this exchange as central to the ICP’s impact. By creating space for students and industry partners to engage in structured inquiry, the collaboration reveals assumptions on both sides and encourages more thoughtful decision-making. Sean admires this collaboration and states, "In industry, people often go straight to the answer without trying to truly understand what the problem is. We brought the Wond’ry to Nissan to show us how to be creative and how to approach a problem by breaking it down into segments."
Together, ICP and VIF create an environment where academic rigor, student talent, and industry expertise intersect. For Nissan, the partnership provides a structured way to explore complex questions outside traditional development timelines. For students, it offers meaningful exposure to real-world challenges and professional ways of working.
As the collaboration continues, Vanderbilt and Nissan remain focused on advancing innovation practice through shared learning, disciplined inquiry, and long-term partnership.