I am experimenting with other forms of interaction to engage folks in research enterprise topics. There’s a Twitter feed, not sure how valuable it may be, that tracks a bit of what I’m doing each day. Right now the feed is from “Umbut” which has a story about it, but, um, not now.
On Linked-In, we’ve got a new group up called New Research Enterprise, which might be a useful way of assembling articles on the development of innovation policy, how university research in particular (but also federal lab, foundation, and industry research) play into it, and what can be done to extend, improve, correct, and stimulate practice and policy. Even if we are “doing just fine” as some would have it, the commitment to community must include a constant edge to figure out how to do things way better. RTEI is one of those edges. This discussion may help to identify professionals that want to build out new research-community interfaces, especially ones that take advantage of open business models.
As well, we’ve got the Yahoo IM chat tool up at RTEIUW. I’m hoping that small school IP and research contracting programs might find it useful as a point of discussion as they navigate various opportunities.
Also aiming to get IAN up and going. The stub from 2007 is still a good start–it just took a lot longer to get RTEI up as the platform than I thought. See http://ian.terapad.com As RTEI scales up our operations, we’ll be putting some resources behind IAN to create a referral of opportunity network and a set of tools to rapidly build commons to expedite uptake of research assets.