“It’s an unusual partnership — a land-grant school like U.R.I. and an institution like Brown,” said Russell Carey, Brown’s executive vice president for planning and policy. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

It’s the sort of collaboration that academic, business and government officials here hope to emulate and build on as they, like many other community leaders around the country, seek to promote a fledgling innovation district. Such networking, experts say, is a key component of the success of established innovation districts elsewhere in the country. Those already flourishing in cities such as Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Cambridge, Mass., are bustling hives of invention and collaboration, usually huddled around major research universities or tech companies, and often with dense infusions of retail, restaurants and housing.

Bruce J. Katz, a scholar with the Brookings Institution, was a co-author of a 2014 report on innovation districts, which he said were recognized at that time as a shift in the “geography of innovation” but still largely undefined. Three years later, Mr. Katz said he was “hard-pressed to come up with a city that’s not thinking about how either the hubs around the universities or these very distinctive parts of the city, usually around waterfronts, where there’s legacy from older industrial space can be converted to other purposes.”

In his experience, the biggest hurdle for these districts is getting a network of public, private, civic, academic and entrepreneurial interests to act in unison. In general, he added, “this is not about the government.”