From the towering pines in Tallahassee to the neon lights of South Beach — Florida is a truly special place.

As the third most populous and fastest growing state, we face a wide variety of challenges. How do we build healthy communities and promote resilience in the face of increasingly frequent natural disasters? What are the best ways to provide opportunity for new and existing residents, while ensuring that future generations can also thrive? How can we support the industries—agriculture, aerospace, and tourism— that built and sustain our economy? Who has a better Cuban sandwich— Tampa or Miami?

Collaborative Collision is an interdisciplinary team development program designed to build and accelerate new research teams to explore complex solutions to complex challenges. We connect researchers with complementary skills, expertise, and resources, guide these connections as they develop into collaborations, and fund promising new teams that have a clear path to developing impactful solutions, securing external funding, and establishing new areas of research, innovation, and creative excellence. Our program began on February 15th with Connector— a campus-wide research networking event focused on making connections between researchers with shared interest in exploring complex challenges. The top challenges identified at Connector have become the topics for Incubator— a ten-week team development program that guides new teams through interdisciplinary project planning, team development, strategic positioning, and proposal writing. At the end of Incubator every team has a complete funding proposal (including a video pitch) and the Office of Research will award one team up to $100,000 to accelerate their impact.

Collaborative Collision: Florida is working to ensure that our friends, neighbors — and yes, even Florida Man— benefit from the discovery, creativity, and innovation taking place at Florida State University!