University Collaboration and Research

How can the academic environment begin to solve some of the largest problems on the planet? Environmental sustainability, energy use, and disease biology are just a few of the world’s looming issues that require not just a single innovation for progress, but collaborative, interdisciplinarian solutions. It is the university’s responsibility, says Stanford President John Hennessy, to assemble diverse teams that can address these issues and offer them the resources to explore them. It is unlikely, he says, that these large global issues will be successfully addressed by a pure entrepreneurship model.