Turning Promising R&D into IT Services

In this era of tightening budgets, will R&D within the IS organization continue to thrive? How can you lead your campus to provide commodity services as simply, cheaply, and reliably as possible so that funds directly support innovation using technology? How do you decide which services to provide when baseline expectations for services keep rising? How can you make the case for continuing to fund R&D? How do you harness innovation to create scaleable, sustainable products? How do you bring in new funding streams to support R&D activities and expand cyberinfrastructure? Many products such as OSP, Sakai, MDID, Classroom Presenter, and iLabs have grown out of university R&D efforts by both IT staff and research faculty.