Institute Co-hosts NSF Workshop in Washington D.C.
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Institute Director Azer Bestavros and Initiative on Cities Director Katharine Lusk co-led the National Science Foundation-Sponsored Workshop on Effective Community-University-Industry Collaboration Models for Smart and Connected Communities Research, as featured in the BU Federal Relations newsletter Beltway BUzz.
This two-day workshop in Washington D.C. featured a series of keynotes and panel discussions that delved into successful models and lessons learned in forming and managing community-university-industry collaborations. Additionally, participants explored the challenges and barriers to the success of such partnerships. After each panel, participants engaged in a quick discussion to synthesize takeaways from the panel – namely barriers, levers, and opportunities – as well as identify other topics and ideas related to the panel discussion.
In the final stages of the workshop, participants explored the human, financial, and technical resources needed to advance ideas that emerged during workshop discussion. Panelists reflected on how this community of multi-disciplinary researchers, city officials, community partners and industry experts can be enabled to share and copy best practices as well as deal with new questions or challenges that continue to emerge in areas such as data privacy, communication, transparency, and program delivery.
The Hariri Institute set the stage for the DC conference by hosting an NSF Visioning Workshop at the Institute during summer 2017. A collaboration with the Initiative on Cities, Office of Corporate Relations, and Center for Information & Systems Engineering at Boston University, this was the first of two workshops designed to bring together stakeholders engaged in Smart & Connected Community (S&CC) projects for the purpose of examining successful partnership models, identifying metrics that partners agree are indicative of success, identifying potential or perceived impediments to broader success, and distilling generalizable lessons/patterns that may be applicable in other settings.
The workshop and conference were sponsored by the National Science Foundation with in-kind support provided by IDC.
[Read the full article on the fall, D.C. conference in the BU Federal Relations Beltway BUzz newsletter]
[Read more about the summer 2017 workshop hosted at the Institute]