Cyberinfrastructure,
Innovation, and University Policy
February 20-21, 2008
(reception February 20)
sponsored by
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
National Science Foundation
Science Commons
University of Michigan
Room 100
Keck Center of the National Academies
500 Fifth St., NW
Washington, DC
by invitation
HOTEL/LOGISTICS (negotiated rate still available as of 2/11)
Research universities hold a unique, central position in a global economy increasingly dependent on knowledge. The successful integration of education and research has stimulated regional and national growth, generating hopes of future growth as well as expectations that universities should generate economic returns on their own. But while universities are still seen as local assets, they must perform in an environment where critical resources – data, standards, tools, skills, and expertise – are becoming ever more mobile and globally accessible.
At the same time, the entire academic enterprise is greatly empowered by these resources, which are used to develop and manage knowledge in new ways by faculty, staff, and students. The success of the Internet provides a compelling account of transformation and leadership within the academic community. Researchers pioneered the early development of the Internet, while leading universities helped it expand from a research project used for research to a production infrastructure primed for commercialization and unlimited uses.
As distinct from conventional notions of technology transfer, commercialization of the Internet did not simply lead to an end product outside of higher education. Rather it signified an ongoing, decentralized and distributed process of transformation inside and outside of academia. The institutional roots of cyberinfrastructure lie in open science, and it draws on the precepts and technology of the open Internet. It is not limited to the sciences but stands as a landmark concept within a broad continuum transforming how knowledge is generated, organized, and applied.
In an environment of intensifying competition and globalization, the Internet has affected commerce far more than it has changed the university. Yet universities face the same lowering of barriers and blurring of boundaries – across distant locations, between informal communication and formal publication, among disciplines and professions, among institutions, between institutional mission and market forces, between scientific research and commercial innovation. The Internet has enhanced and intensified interaction between the campus and the world beyond. It has amplified, diversified, and extended collaboration and the movement of knowledge and know-how in and out of the university. It has accelerated innovation, favoring outsourcing over vertical integration, multiparty over bilateral collaborations, and complex parallel interaction relative to linear, serial processes.
The Internet exemplified technology push. It was, and is, an enabling platform open for innovators to build on in many unforeseeable ways. By contrast, cyberinfrastructure is human-centered, designed from the bottom up for the knowledge needs of user communities. Its greatest value is in its use – i.e., context-specific design and integration rather than the component data, instruments, bandwidth, and other particular resources (all of which may be shared with other users). While cyberinfrastructure commonly supports research, it can also support downstream applications and processes, collaborative software development, or electronic commerce.
For the university, cyberinfrastructure is many different things: a tool for
addressing specific research problems, a vehicle for managing research and
education, a challenge to business as usual, an object of research and
innovation, and an opportunity to redefine the university’s relationship to the
world. Cyberinfrastructure presents academic leaders with a grand challenge
close to home: how to marshal knowledge, technology, and innovation to best
advance more knowledge, technology, and innovation.
This one-day invitational meeting will examine the implications of cyberinfrastructure for institutional strategy and policy – and, conversely, the implications of universities programs and policies on the design of cyberinfrastructure – by focusing on issues in organizing and sustaining the sharing of data, knowledge, technology, and innovation across institution and sector boundaries:
· What are the roles of the individual university, regional consortia, and specialized consortia in sustaining and evolving cyberinfrastructure?
· How can universities reconcile incentives and expectations of increased upstream control with demands for increasing openness?
· How can universities work with industry in advancing data collection, research, and infrastructure that spans open science and proprietary technology?
· How can universities help adapt cyberinfrastructure to downstream innovation, taking into account differences in technologies, innovation, business models, organizational cultures, and costs?
· How will cyberinfrastructure affect the balance between independent, collaborative, and sequential innovation? How can different models of cyberinfrastructure mediate between closed and open models of collaboration?
· What are the implications of cyberinfrastructure for different forms of knowledge and the codification enterprise within and beyond the academy? What role should academic services provide in reaching agreement on standardized definitions, categories, and procedures?
· What is the practical research agenda for cyberinfrastructure and knowledge about knowledge – and how can universities participate as institutions?
· How does innovation in cyberinfrastructure differ from innovation in natural science-based technology?
· What are the implications of cyberinfrastructure for public access to university resources and the public service mission of the university? How does it affect tradeoffs between exclusivity and nonexclusivity in dealings with industry?