Cities and communities face growing challenges as population size and demographics change, infrastructure ages, and economic and environmental pressures increase. Collaborations among cities and communities, universities, and industry have the potential to address these challenges -- providing opportunities for information and communication technology innovations, research capacity building, and workforce growth. This project includes a two-part workshop to be hosted at Boston University in July 2017 and in Washington, D.C. in November 2017. The goal of the workshop series is to identify and propose effective models of city-university-industry collaboration that help bridge the gap between fundamental research on problems inspired by communities, aiming to provide deployable solutions and sustainable services that improve the quality of life in various smart-and-connected community settings.

The anticipated outcome of the workshops is to generate a report that puts forth best practices and models of collaboration, with a particular emphasis on actionable opportunities that will enhance the impact of cross-sector smart-and-connected communities research. Specifically, this project seeks to understand and elucidate resources and processes, which yield robust, mutually beneficial, enduring relationships between cities, universities, and industries; translate fundamental, sociotechnical research into applications that have a meaningful impact within the community; and create foundations necessary for applications to be sustained over time. In addition, identifying improved processes and incentive-compatible collaboration models has the potential to catalyze a number of broader impacts, including: enhancing student engagement and experiential learning through translational research; ensuring sustainability of established relationships and of developed solutions; developing a diverse human capital by engaging underrepresented minorities and early career researchers in workshop planning and activities; and advancing technology commercialization and business development.