For more than 30 years, the Cifre (Training through research convention for the industry) has been subsidizing all companies operating under French law and hiring a PhD student to work on a research project with a public laboratory. The result of the 3-year work should be a PhD thesis. So, working on a thesis in a partnership with a company or an association is possible! Are you looking of state of the art, internationally recognised scientific skills to set up a network of partners? You can entrust a PhD student with a research project shared between your organization and a research laboratory.