try UO physicist Raghu Parthasarathy’s Eighteenth Elephant blog here. A snippet:
… Think small. Obviously, we should tackle areas that are important, but this in itself isn’t a sufficient criterion. If this adventure is going to have an impact, it needs to select areas in which relatively small-scale effort can pay off. What does “small scale” mean? I can’t remember the exact number, but the Knight Campus will have something like 50 faculty and their associated groups and support staff. This is great, but it’s not a national lab; it’s not even MIT. What’s more, while UO is quite strong in the sciences, it has no engineering departments — no bioengineering, no chemical engineering, etc. (Yes, it’s odd to have a research university with zero engineering in it…) As such it would be foolish to think we’ll make a big splash in many of the obvious grand challenges. We should, therefore, target goals that are important yet tractable, or ideas whose importance is not yet appreciated, so that small steps have a big impact. What could these be? Before getting to that…
Please comment there, not here.