  IT-driven innovation is an enormous factor in the worldwide economic
leadership of the United States. It is larger than finance, construction, or
transportation, and it employs nearly 6% of the US workforce. The top three
companies, as measured by market capitalization, are IT companies - Apple,
Google (now Alphabet), and Microsoft. Facebook, a relatively recent entry in
the top 10 list by market capitalization has surpassed Walmart, the nation's
largest retailer, and the largest employer in the world. The net income of just
the top three exceeds $80 billion - roughly 100 times the total budget of the
NSF CISE directorate which funds 87% of computing research. In short, the
direct return on federal research investments in IT research has been
enormously profitable to the nation.
  The IT industry ecosystem is also evolving. The time from conception to
market of successful products has been cut from years to months. Product life
cycles are increasingly a year or less. This change has pressured companies to
focus industrial R&D on a pipeline or portfolio of technologies that bring
immediate, or almost immediate, value to the companies. To defeat the
competition and stay ahead of the pack, a company must devote resources to
realizing gains that are shorter term, and must remain agile to respond quickly
to market changes driven by new technologies, new startups, evolving user
experience expectations, and the continuous consumer demand for new and
exciting products.
  Amidst this landscape, the Computing Community Consortium convened a
round-table of industry and academic participants to better understand the
landscape of industry-academic interaction, and to discuss possible actions
that might be taken to enhance those interactions. We close with some
recommendations for actions that could expand the lively conversation we
experienced at the round-table to a national scale.
