Setting the Stage for Next-Generation Research

Abstract

California, the state with a long history of stimulating new science and technology, has now begun a revolution in the means of organizing the research responsible for fresh advances. California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has the goal of creating a major shift in the way in which institutions carry out research. Financed by the state of California, the work focuses on developing a next-generation research environment for academic institutions in the digital age. However, because it includes collaborations with industrial RD creating research teams whose members can be located wherever they are through the Internet; supporting the involvement of faculty members, students, industry, government, and community partners; enabling prototyping in living laboratories; and providing technical professionals as bridges between academia and Role of Technology Technology has produced much of the foundation for the effort. Combining the increases in telecommunications bandwidth, ubiquitous access via networking, greatly increased computing power and storage capacity, together with advances in nanotechnology and biotechnology, represents what Smarr calls a once-in-two-decades transition in capabilities. However, a cultural change at least equally important. Calit2 approach puts almost exclusive emphasis on transdisciplinary teamwork. That goes beyond the multidisciplinary research already practiced in academia. For universities, the entire package means significantly less departmentalization than occurs at present. For corporate R&D operations, it implies markedly more outsourcing, via such ventures as open innovation (see RTM, November-December 2007, pp. 8, 9), as well as collaboration with academic scientists from the very start of their research projects. Calit2 project has emerged against a general background of change in corporations' approaches to their R&D. Companies no longer can afford to do everything, Smarr says. We are going from the wholly owned like Bell Labs and IBM Research to a new form of partnering between universities and industry. Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, echoes that thought. Corporate R&D becoming a lot more open, she says. Look at open innovation--inviting and asking a lot of people to contribute ideas and solutions to internal problems. There are a lot of opportunities to contribute. raw material of R&D also in flux. The tools of R&D will change, with new technologies, more massive amounts of data that allow for different kinds of research, and the mining of that data on scales we've never seen before, Gorbis points out. We'll be able to simulate a lot more things. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Calit2 aims to show how to do just that. Our job, Smarr says, is to try to imagine the impossible and prepare our society to make use of it. Exponential change appears to transform the impossible into the routine. Living Laboratories One of four institutes launched in December 2000 through the California Institute for Science and Innovation, Calit2 has the tangible asset of two living laboratory buildings--one at the University of California, San Diego and the other at the University of California, Irvine. …