Strategic Plan 2025-2040
Volume 1: VisionFor more than a century, the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) has operated as a state agency within The Texas A&M University System, driving research, education, and technology that help businesses succeed, communities thrive, and the nation to remain competitive. This plan outlines our direction, why this moment matters, and how every member of our community — executive leaders, faculty, research staff, professional staff, and students — can engage and benefit.
In the 21st century, the global, national, and state challenges continue to demand we innovate and provide excellence to our engineering research and workforce approaches. To lead and adapt, we are organizing for greater speed, scale, and impact. Our strategy builds on TEES’s tradition of excellence while updating how we set priorities, allocate resources, and collaborate with industry and government.
This document is our roadmap for growth, discovery, and service to Texas and the nation. It outlines our goals, how we will measure progress, the investments already in motion, and what these efforts mean for you. We encourage you to read it closely, share it with colleagues and collaborators, and use it as a guide as we work together to grow TEES’s impact through 2040.
– Robert Bishop
TEES Strategic Vision For The 21st Century
Our 2040 strategic vision builds on the TEES’s tradition of excellence to thrive in an era of rapidly changing technology and increasingly competitive funding. Specifically, we are organizing the engineering research enterprise for greater competitiveness, speed, scale, and impact, while delivering more ideas, more solutions, and more graduates. This includes updating how we set priorities, allocate resources, and collaborate with industry and government. We are reorganizing our structure, investments, and partnerships to be more competitive for external research funding. We are also invigorating our interests in technology translation and commercialization to unlock new funding sources and student career pathways.
Field An Elite Team
The objective is to recruit and retain an elite team of world-class researchers, professionals, and students to ensure that critical research and operations needs are met.
Align Research Priorities
The objective is to align TEES research to state, federal, and industrial funding priorities.
Manage Resources
The objective is to ensure efficient and ethical stewardship of financial and physical resources to enable achievement of the strategic priorities.
Ensure Professional Responsiveness
The objective is to empower researchers with timely, compliant, service-oriented operations.
Ensure Next Generation Education And Training
The objective is to advance engineering excellence by delivering high-impact programs, professional development, and life-long learning opportunities – from cradle to gray.
Translate Innovative Solutions
The objective is to create an environment of entrepreneurism across TEES that embraces translation of innovative solutions toward impact.
What This Means For You
For Leaders And Administrators
- Focus on decisions that accelerate progress: seed funding, delegated authorities, shared-platform governance, and streamlined licensing/contracting pathways.
- Sponsor seed funding, empower the ERO, and align policies for speed and effective partnerships.
- Hold regular reviews on key performance indicators covering talent pipeline, proposal submission rates, facility utilization, and compliance, while clearing roadblocks.
- Champion collaborations across colleges, centers, and system members to present a unified, competitive front to sponsors and partners
For Faculty and Researchers
- Engage early with the ERO on large, interdisciplinary proposals, foundation strategies, and industry collaborations.
- New faculty orientations to the TEES and TAMU research enterprise.
- Use seed funding to explore bold ideas, build new teams, and generate preliminary results that strengthen success in achieving major awards.
- Connect with the TEES Collaboration Board and other industries to pursue sponsored research, joint IP, and translational pathways — including INSPIRE when appropriate.
- Promote a culture of entrepreneurism leading to the generation of more patents, licensing deals, and start-ups.
For Students
- Provide research experiences in priority areas where facilities and partners are rapidly expanding.
- Encourage professional development programs, internships, and industry-linked projects to gain in-demand skills and networks.
- Provide opportunities to participate in workshops, Tech Talks, and entrepreneurship programs to translate ideas into prototypes, IP, and startups.
- Join priority-area labs and programs and pursue internships and entrepreneurial pathways.
For Professional Staff
- Pursue cross-training to enhance flexibility and resilience across teams and workloads.
- Join communities of practice and continuous-improvement efforts to elevate service quality and support faculty and student researcher success.
- Adopt new automation tools and standardized playbooks to improve speed and accuracy and provide feedback to refine workflow.
Five-Year Benchmarks
We track progress with transparent dashboards and annual reports that include proposal activity and success rates, research expenditures, talent metrics, facility utilization, industry funding, intellectual property (IP) and startups, and compliance indicators. This data will inform decisions and resource allocation. They will be monitored and reported annually, with adjustments made transparently and based on reviews of the performance data.
More on 5-Year BenchmarksEarly – Accomplishments
To launch this strategic plan, we have made a series of targeted investments and operational changes. A subset of the investments and changes are listed in the table below. These initiatives are already enhancing our capacity to move quickly, compete for transformational opportunities, and continue to deliver in a rapidly evolving funding landscape.
Explore Our AccomplishmentsRisks And How We Manage Them
The risks to the agency are grouped into four categories: People, Funding, Infrastructure, and Compliance. The strategic priorities were formulated to directly address each risk. Essential to the strategic plan is continuous assessment and refinement to address evolving challenges. TEES annually assesses the key performance indicators listed above and performs a mandatory strategic risk analysis.
View Details on Risks