Most people think of universities as the place where kids go for advanced education. In fact, universities are our nation's most important research engine - a point Jonathan Cole makes in his recent book, The great American university." The research and innovations that have come from institutions of higher education are major reasons for the competitiveness of the United States in the world economy and for the status and influence of the U.S. in international affairs. This does not mean that teaching is unimportant. The best researchers are often also the best teachers. Their deep expertise and passion can be infectious and effective in the classroom and can be transformative in one-on-one mentoring in the laboratory. And teaching can have a synergistic effect on research, as the youthful exuberance, novel perspectives, and obvious questions that students bring to the enterprise can lead to new and important insights.

As the problems scientists and scholars address have increased in complexity, the once solitary geniuses across our university campuses have changed how they work. They are now more likely to work in larger and larger investigative teams that cut across disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries. This trend, documented by various bibliometric and scientometric analyses, has transformed how research is done in universities - and how it will be done in the future. Fifty years ago, solitary investigators were doing the most impactful research. For the past decade, it is large teams of scientists and scholars who are doing the most impactful research.

Institutions of higher education have not kept pace with these changes. Universities still evaluate their junior faculty in terms of their demonstrated ability to make "independent" contributions. Such institutional practices limits the opportunities for these young scholars to become involved in large scientific teams and reduces the likelihood that these teams will continue to be fueled by the brightest young minds and newest methodologies. Offices or Research in universities have to focus more on legal issues, regulatory requirements, and compliance by researchers than on the promotion of research or scholarship.

Universities tend to provide funds to support "large scale research investigations" when the expected value based on the indirect cost return from grants makes it rational to do so - and even then the support is available only to a small number of faculty and tends to be in the form of physical infrastructure - a building, a telescope, or a magnet - whose impact on scholarship at a university is limited in terms of scope and duration. These investments do little to change the overall climate for research in our institutions of higher education.

Foundations, government funding agencies, and philanthropists who wish to promote progress on Big Questions or Big Problems find institutions of higher education prefer to take ownership of the project for the benefit of their faculty, reputation, and bottom line. Given the increased multi-institutional nature of scientific teams today, this inclination - as understandable as it may be - can have a high cost in terms of obstructing progress on these Questions and Problems.

We developed and implemented the Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago three years ago as an experiment in what it means to be a research university and what it means to be a faculty member at a research university. Arete takes the existing departmental structure at universities and conceptualizes it as one dimension within a multidimensional matrix. It eliminates barriers of disciplinary and geographical proximity by capitalizing on personal interactions and new information technologies. Institutional, geographical, and departmental borders play virtually no role in the selection of the faculty to participate in these large, interdisciplinary teams. It uses the gravitational pull of massive problems to attract the best minds around the world to collaboratively attack these problems on multiple, coordinated fronts. But, ultimately, Arete is not responsible for the identification of the problems, the construction of the teams, or the success of the efforts, the faculty are. Arete realizes that the successful construction and orchestration of such teams requires visionary leadership, logistical support, unremitting insistence for deep interdisciplinary exchanges, and adaptability as new evidence and insights emerge. The function of Arete is to serve as an interdisciplinary incubator, an enzyme that catalyzes the potential of experts working together in large, multi-institutional, interdisciplinary teams to address big Questions and Problems.

At present, most institutions of higher education have no mechanism for developing or staffing such an infrastructure, nor do many have any notion of this need. They continue to conceptualize scholarship in terms of the work of solitary geniuses despite clear evidence that this conception no longer holds (e.g., see Wuchty et al., Science, 2007, vol 316, 1036-1039). As a result, institutions of higher education are losing their competitive advantage, and as a consequence so is the U.S.

Teams, of course, can be less effective than the sum of individual efforts. It therefore is essential to continue to embrace the work of solitary scholars when that is best, and to know the problems, contexts, and individuals who favor collaborative efforts. When teams are the most potent engine, we need to develop better guides to identify the leadership style and contingencies that optimize group effectiveness.

Financial incentives that reward long-term rather than immediate successes are needed for teams which seek to solve Big Problems. Play and the satisfaction of working meaningfully to improve the future our children will inherit are also important. Thus, the leadership needs to establish that the work of the team is simultaneously serious and not serious at all. Failures for the right reason should be encouraged. Failures due to insufficient foresight or avoidable errors should be eschewed, of course, but failures from which the group learns are important for advancement. The incentive structure therefore needs to be designed carefully to maintain the intrinsic interests of any group who is tackling a problem that will require considerable time and effort. Progress in science typically is erratically incremental, with large leaps made likely by rigorous preparation and an open, playful mind. Innovative solutions, which may initially seem implausible, are as important to consider as are probable answers. The culture of these interdisciplinary teams should be to engage others with discrepant views in serious dialogue. Among the lessons we have learned thus far in Arete are: