Trusteeship - May/June 2020 - 31

Arizona State University

Arizona State University Enterprise
Partners Board of Trustees

For the past five years, Arizona State University (ASU) has sat
atop U.S. News & World Report's ranking in the list of the most
innovative American universities, which is a distinction based largely
on a survey of presidents, provosts, and admission deans. ASU has
grown dramatically in size and academic stature since Michael Crow
became president in 2002. Its graduation rate has climbed by 20
points even as enrollment surged to 75,000 in-person students in
Tempe and the greater Phoenix area and 45,000 online students.
What was once a traditional philanthropic board for the university has itself embraced structural changes that have broadened its
reach, expertise, and impact in directing a new, nimble, and entrepreneurial entity called ASU Enterprise Partners. Its board remains
the fundraising arm for ASU, but is now a separate 501(c)(3)
not-for-profit corporation and the parent for five other nonprofits
each tasked with identifying new revenue opportunities for the
university, not just from donors but arranging real estate projects,
patenting professors' discoveries, securing military, and civilian
government contracts and in other ways. ASU Enterprise Partners,
launched in 2016, represents "a truly novel model of board governance for institutionally related foundations," said Rick Shangrew,
its architect and chief executive officer until his recent retirement.
While the old ASU Foundation handled some of the same trans-

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

actions, it was on a much smaller scale with
fewer staff and less firepower than Enterprise
Partners brings to the table.
"You can think of Enterprise Partners as
a holding company," said Bill Post, the board
chair and retired CEO of Pinnacle West
Capital Corp., which owns Arizona's largest
electric utility. The overall architecture of
Enterprise Partners drew on the corporate
subsidiary and shared service model that Post
helped implement there.
Post joined the original ASU Foundation
Board two decades ago and stepped up his
activities on behalf of his alma mater after
retiring as CEO in 2009. He serves on corporate boards as well and brings that perspective
to Enterprise Partners' work.
"What we've done is build a board very
similar to corporate boards. If I go back
20 years, volunteers would come and do
whatever the university asked them to do,
including the fundraising," he said. "We still
do that-[ASU raises $250 million a year]-but we've also added
the obligation, accountability, and responsibility for being a board
member over a separate 501(c)(3) entirely focused on the benefit
of ASU with its own legal structure."
Members still have that spirit of volunteerism but also "feel a
responsibility to take Enterprise Partners as far as they can in supporting the school," he said.
Dan Dillon, who succeeded Shangrew as the Enterprise Partners CEO in January 2020, credits Post and his fellow trustees with
getting Enterprise Partners off to a flying start. "All of them are
very, very accomplished business people in different sectors. We
would not be where we are today without them."
Dillon, formerly ASU's chief marketing officer and still in
charge of university-wide marketing and branding, himself came
out of a long career in the corporate world. The trustees' impact "is
significant and probably unmeasurable, both in time and revenue
they are helping us generate," said Dillon. "The Enterprise Partners
board and the subsidiary boards operate at a professional level
equal to any of the boards I've been exposed to in my career."
Shangrew recalled that when they first began discussing the new
governance model, "Post and other members voiced concern that they
would lack the expertise, depth, and diversity of thought to provide
each enterprise with the most effective leadership." They needn't have
worried. They consulted with ASU leaders, studied models of foundation and corporate governance, "and spent long hours into the spring
of 2016 to develop a transition plan and new model of a universityaffiliated enterprise," Shangrew said.
MAY. JUN. 2020 TRUSTEESHIP 31

Trusteeship - May/June 2020

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