A new university strategy: The research cluster

Like UMass Boston (Research Reenvisioned for the 21st Century: Expanding the Reach of Scholarship at the University of Massachusetts Boston), other universities have begun to use the “cluster” approach to organize leading edge research involving multi-disciplinary efforts.

The term “cluster” was popularized by Michael Porter in The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990). Clusters are geographic areas where there are enough resources and competences to reach a critical threshold, giving it a key position in a given economic activity, with a decisive sustainable competitive advantage over other places, or even world supremacy in that field.


Taking a page from business strategy, research universities seek to build a compelling and differentiated strategy for growth, and therefore reputation, driving it off of core competencies matched with powerful market and competitive insights.

The increasing use of a business model based on market factors to guide university strategic decision making is driven by increased competition for students and research dollars resulting in pressure on universities to market themselves; rising costs of research in the sciences; growing media use of competitive rankings, as indicators of presumed educational quality; and increased costs of operating the university.

But while the use of a business model makes sense for university administrators whose success is directly tied to their performance in the advancing the institution as a whole, success of faculty is tied to disciplinary recognition, not institutional success, as measured in part by the scientific community outside the institution, often resulting in competing priorities.

Nevertheless, there are many faculty members who realize, when they push the limits of their field that they have much more in common with colleagues across the university than with members of their own departments. They also hear from their students that employers want graduates who are prepared to meet the multidisciplinary needs of the world, integrating what they have learned in disparate fields.

To encourage researchers from a wide range of disciplines to collaborate to bring research knowledge to bear on issues of importance, universities have begun to organize research clusters. Oregon State University claims to have coined the term "research cluster." “We're breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries because we've learned that collaboration creates synergy, excitement, and creativity."



New Mexico State University also claims to be one of the first to use the term. It has established five research clusters to take advantage of strategic opportunities that build on institutional strengths and respond to local, regional, and national needs.


Colorado State University has even trademarked the term "supercluster" to describe a "new model to move research to market."

Clusters are emerging as a way to express distinctiveness, as well as to invest in research growth.

The University of Houston has established six interdisciplinary research clusters designed to enable scholars to better exchange ideas and explore emerging research areas and to work more effectively with industry, other research organizations and the community.

These research clusters are powerful centers of creativity, in which teams of researchers from a wide range of disciplines collaborate across traditional boundaries to bring research knowledge to bear on issues of intellectual, scientific, social, economic, environmental and cultural importance.



The University of Washington has a seed fund to organize research clusters. Their Crossdisciplinary Research Clusters are intended to bring together faculty and graduate students from different departments and disciplines with shared research interests. The university intends to seed new and vital research activity but not provide ongoing support of existing programs. Funds can be used to support meeting costs, photocopying, visiting speakers, etc.

In practice, the key initial challenge in organizing research clusters is to overcome the “either/or” mentality. The question, the university can either invest in clusters or colleges, but not both, is replaced with a “what if/and” question, what if you thought of college and cluster investment as synergistic? By making this shift, the promise of the cluster approach began to become possible.