The creation of the Institutional Strategic Initiatives Office (ISI Office) and the ISI portfolio stem from a consultation process that took place in 2018, when faculty and university leadership took a close look at the institution’s research collaboration potential.
They wanted to support the development and sustainability of large-scale, cross-divisional, and interdisciplinary initiatives, but acknowledged that the size and complexity of the institution made this difficult. What was needed was a dedicated space, where initiatives with the greatest potential to act on the most pressing social, economic, political and environmental issues could be quickly identified, tested, and grown, ensuring that strategic institutional investment could have the most impact.
The ISI Office was created in 2019 to drive this goal: to coordinate university resources, facilitate relationship building, and serve as a connection hub that incubates, catalyzes and supports high-impact research spanning disciplines and academic divisions.
Through the ISI Office, and in collaboration with colleagues in the academic divisions and shared services, ISIs have gained access to supports that have propelled their research networks forward. Importantly, this support has strengthened the readiness of ISIs and their partners to capitalize on large-scale, external competitions and opportunities. It has also increased the ability of ISIs to deliver training and resources for students, early-career researchers, and faculty as well as contribute to the university’s equity, diversity and inclusion goals.
The start-up environment in which ISIs were conceived has enabled the rapid incubation of initiatives, with many lessons learned in a short time about the specific innovation needs of large-scale research collaboration. One of those lessons is that the contributions of each ISI will differ: some ISIs will serve as a space to pilot an idea; other ISIs will grow and begin multi-year and multi-partner journeys that will have wide contributions across many academic fields.
The stories in this report speak to the breadth and depth of the successes of the ISIs and the viability of the ISI model as a template for purposeful seeding of research networks in pursuit of solving the world’s grand challenges.