Innovation & Impact Summit highlights global collaboration to meet pace of change

If there’s a single, critical concern that threads through many of the technological developments and challenges that dominate the headlines and guide the economy, it may well be the rapid pace of change. That challenge — and the opportunities it offers — came up time and time again at the Times Higher Education (THE) Innovation & Impact Summit, hosted by Virginia Tech at Academic Building One in Alexandria on Nov. 18–20.

This year’s event brought together more than 200 delegates from 61 universities across 28 countries to convene along the banks of the Potomac River. The panels included senior leaders from companies such as Amazon, Bayer, Deloitte, and Microsoft; organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the American National Standards Institute; and agencies across the federal government. 

As THE’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Phil Baty put it in his opening remarks, higher education has long served as something of a “move slow and fix things” antidote to Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. But in 2025, there is a need for universities to evolve to move wisely and quickly to fix things while maintaining the evidence, ethics, and empathy that have long underpinned university values.

For its first-ever such event in North America, THE was looking for not just the right university, but an institution like Virginia Tech working to embrace the partnerships needed to tackle those challenges head on. 

“I think this operation is just a wonderful case study of how to do it well,” said Baty. “Work in part with the state government; build investment in innovation, technology, and talent; do that in partnership with big tech companies; do it close to government, in the capital city. It’s a wonderful living laboratory of all that this whole event is about.”

That focus on not just addressing, but integrating academia into the process of solving real-world problems, was at the center of this year’s summit. Advances in technology develop so quickly that by the time a traditional curriculum might be developed and a student enrolled and eventually graduated into the workforce, that landscape will have changed again entirely. To address this, universities have the opportunity to integrate the latest technology into the classroom and partner with companies on real-world projects they’re tackling.  

Doing so requires evolving from an insular “ivory tower” on a campus to an interconnected community member and partner working at the local, state, national, and international level. That transformation is central to Virginia Tech’s mission in 2025 and beyond.

“That’s starting to change,” Virginia Tech President Tim Sands said during his chat with Laurie Locascio, president and chief executive officer of the American National Standards Institute. “We’re working very hard at building our innovation network, being where our partners are so we can deliver in our mission areas.”

That shift in the university’s dynamic is a big reason the conference was hosted by Virginia Tech at Academic Building One. Beyond the research labs and maker spaces housed within, the building’s location in Alexandria at the intersection of academia, government, and industry was an intentional aim for welcoming events like this conference. 

“We’re here at the nexus of all three,” said Lance Collins, Virginia Tech's vice president for the greater D.C. area. “Part of our DNA is connectivity. We have very strong ties with dozens of companies at this point. We’re part of their mission, and we bring a cultural element to what they’re doing.”

Some of the groundwork for the partnership with THE had been laid by Virginia Tech Senior Vice President and Chief Research Officer Dan Sui’s participation in recent Innovation & Impact Summits, in Delhi, India, and Schenzen, China. Sui joined two panels at this year’s summit, Responsible Innovation: Anticipating Unanticipated Consequences at Scale, and Responsible Internationalization of Research. 

“These events only work if we get a great partner that’s fully engaged, that’s fully putting its own people forward, that helps set the agenda,” said Baty. “And Virginia Tech’s been brilliant, perfect partners.”

The summit affirmed Virginia Tech’s role connecting scholarship, industry, and communities to advance solutions to real world problems. It also reflected two years of universitywide planning led by the Provost’s Office in partnership with Research and Innovation, Principal Partnerships, Continuing and Professional Education, Marketing and Communications, and other partners.

Just as emerging, real world challenges were being discussed in panels, potential solutions were hovering two stories above. In the Benchmarking and Funding Research Security Programs discussion, one panelist explained that Canadian technology had found its way into an Iranian drone, which was used by Russia in its war against Ukraine. At the same time, the interactive Defense Against Demonstrations of drones, or uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), in the building’s two-story drone cage showed how other advances in drone technology in the Russia-Ukraine war have only heightened the urgency for counter-UAS systems here at home. That’s something Virginia Tech is addressing through its new research center, a cooperative effort between the Virginia Tech National Security Institute and the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership.

Similarly, while another panel discussed cybersecurity threats to food, water, and agriculture, Cayelan Carey and Quinn Thomas, co-directors of the Center for Ecosystem Forecasting, presented how better forecasting can lead to improved water and environmental security, impacting everything from fisheries and crop yields to vector-borne diseases, pests, and pathogens.

Virginia Tech moderators and panelists also included: College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Dean Mario Ferruzzi, Professor Lingjia Liu, Assistant Vice President for Research Security John Talerico, Executive Director of the National Security Institute Eric Paterson, Vice President of Innovation and Partnerships Brandy Salmon, Executive Director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Luiz DaSilva, and Kirk Cameron, interim director of the Institute for Advance Computing.

The urgency around the challenge of acceleration was threaded through nearly every panel, highlighting the ways that Virginia Tech is already very much in the middle of working toward solutions. Crucially, though, as Virginia Tech Executive Vice President and Provost Cyril Clarke highlighted, those solutions will not be discovered solely in the classroom. He stressed that if there was a single takeaway that linked the discussions of the week, it was the need for strong partnerships.

“If you accept the premise that most adults learn most of the time experientially, then you must understand that universities alone cannot create all of those experiences,” said Clarke. “It’s absolutely essential that students experience the industrial environments, and the complex, transdisciplinary elements that are key to their education.”

See more photos from the Times Higher Education Innovation & Impact Summit.