While digitization and digitalization require substantial organic change (1) and often times M&A (2), partnering represents a 3^rd lever for strategy execution. Partners can come from multiple backgrounds. Some working for-profit, such as software vendors, consultants or incubators. Yet there are interesting players from the non-profit arena, such as governmental institutions or universities. Universities among others focus on education but also on research that ideally contributes to solving complex and practically relevant problems. Having started with a project seminar in 2010 in collaboration with the chair of Prof. Dr. Bernd Hellingrath, Arvato and ERCIS have repeated multiple projects on interesting digital challenges. Multiple people have been hired on all levels from BSc over MSc to PhD. On top partners have jointly created new collaboration formats up to the The ERCIS Omni-channel Lab (https://omni-channel.ercis.org/) which successfully augmented 1000 experts at Arvato CRM and ended after 3 fruitful years under leadership of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Jörg Becker, Prof. Dr. Gottfried Vossen and Prof. Dr. Heike Trautmann and Karsten Kraume. The presentation will refer to some specific projects driven by Matthias Carnein, MSc, Markus Heuchert, MSc and Dipl.-Inf. Leschek Homann and multiple colleagues at Arvato. The presentation will also show, how the broader ecosystem including Universities of Paderborn (Prof. Dr. Daniel Beverungen), Duisburg/Essen (Prof. Dr. Stefan Stieglitz), Nürnberg-Erlangen (Prof. Dr. Martin Matzner) to name a few was leveraged. The example at hand can serve as a reference and shows, how “easily” a partnership can be started and grow, assuming firm belief in the complementarity of academia and practice as well as an entrepreneurial mindset on both ends.