The greatest challenges facing the education and research community today revolve around the issues of a quality education, funding, relevance, and return on investment. National concerns are often focused on how to unlock the potential of universities and the investments being made to effectively put research into practice, while creating an entrepreneurial workforce that can lead an economic renaissance. In the previous paper, we explored the implications and potential of organizing a university’s research processes around challenge-based, interdisciplinary teams or research clusters. Research clusters were defined as flexible and inclusive, team-based, interdisciplinary research structures that encompass faculty members, centers and departments, and community partners (including other universities); they are focused on common themes or broad focus areas inspired by major 21st century challenges.