How to solicit funded research projects from industry to perform while in graduate school? My ultimate goal is to secure a position in industry post graduation. I figured a solid approach would be align myself with current problems and try and partner to solve them. This gives me resume wins for when I am back on the market. Also industry may have deeper pockets than NIH for my field. How would one go about this assuming no contacts are known a priori. Also how would a PI react to such activities if say I were to land one with funding dollars attached? I figured it would be a win-win. 

Any comments are greatly appreciated.
How would one go about this assuming no contacts are known a priori.


Likely you can't go for this without any contacts at all. You are thinking about this in the wrong order - you can't get money from industry first and use this to build up contacts to industry; rather, you would build up contacts to industry to achieve a level of trust so that you would be later on in a position to receive industry funding. This also means that getting direct industry sponsorship as a PhD student is at least uncommon - typically, companies are more interested in sponsoring a professor or chair that they have positively interacted with over a sustained period of time.

Slightly longish story short, your planned approach (acquiring industry funding) is not a suitable means to your stated goal (landing a job in industry).