As mentioned before, the convergence of research fields and research organizations brings obvious benefits: it concentrates human capital and financial resources.
Under Dr. Hockfield, M.I.T. has diversified its student body — 45 percent of the class of 2015 are women and 24 percent are underrepresented minorities — and seen a convergence of research in life sciences and research in engineering and the physical sciences.
Research and development at the nanoscale requires a large degree of integration, from convergence of research disciplines in new fields of enquiry to new linkages between start-ups, regional actors and research facilities.
Modern synthetic biology has its roots in many fields, but is mainly based on a convergence of research in engineering, computing and modelling, with molecular biology, evolutionary genomics, and biotechnology on the one hand – and research into the origin of life, artificial life and orthogonal (parallel) life on the other (see Luisi 2006; Bedau et al. 2009; Peretó and Català 2007; Campos 2009).
The aim was to document practice and convergence between research groups, highlighting areas for discussion and providing a basis for recommendations for harmonisation and standardisation.
The standardization ideas of Synthetic Biology emerged in the late 1990s from a convergence of research on cellular computing, and were motivated by an array of applications from tissue regeneration to bio-sensing to mathematical programming.
There has been an interesting convergence of research at UGA on these houses in terms of their effects both on heat stress and also threats from winds.
According to Ovum, churn reduction is the most common objective of convergence; Ovum research found a 50percentt reduction in churn among customers with multiple services at Belgacom and KPN, the leading telecom carriers in Belgium and Netherlands, respectively.
"MaRS offers a wonderful venue to concentrate firepower in these areas," says Naylor, "It will be at once a company incubator and a magnet for early stage venture capital, a centre that sparks convergence of research streams by co-locating start-ups from different fields, and an innovation 'mall' where multiple universities can set up tech transfer offices".
