Blockchain@UBC is a collaborative research cluster (Blockchain and Distributed Research and Education Cluster) focusing on blockchain technology as one component of investigating the broader research question “How can emerging technologies be leveraged to benefit Canadians. The cluster fosters academia-industry collaboration on the understanding that combining applied and basic research produces higher-impact research than doing them separately. Grand challenges, exemplified by assessing how best to leverage new technologies for the benefit of Canadians, are not simply technical challenges. They are, at their core, socio-technical challenges. To understand how best to leverage new technologies, such as the blockchain, technical innovations must be accompanied by understanding the social, political, legal and institutional contexts within which the technology will operate, and to working with stakeholders within those contexts to introduce changes to the ways that they operate or think about their world that will complement the technical innovations. The cluster promotes collaborative teamwork to accelerate innovation and produce more frequent success stories. Teams comprised of individuals from diverse backgrounds (i.e., from different sectors or disciplines) bring complementary knowledge, skills, and attitudes, and use more diverse methods that can be used to leverage an important technological innovation such as the blockchain. Research that combines the knowledge base, work processes and evaluation methods of diverse disciplines also promotes more innovative research.