Research Corporation for Science Advancement's Scialog program is designed to accelerate the work of 21st-century transformational science through funding research, intensive dialog and community building. Each multi-year initiative seeks to support highly innovative early career scientists in response to a complex research challenge that serves as a driver in contemporary science. The first initiative under this program is Scialog: Solar Energy Conversion, and it is focused on fundamental research at the molecular and nanoscale levels that shows high potential to impact advanced energy technologies. Scialog is a research grant program emphasizing annual conferences with authentic dialog and competitive proposal writing. The process creates new cross-disciplinary collaborative teams based on novel ideas which emerge at conferences. Rigorous scientific assessment has been an integral component of the Scialog initiative from inception. This talk will describe the Scialog process and present intriguing initial assessment results suggesting that Scialog has so far been successful in creating new small cross-disciplinary teams organized around highly innovative research projects. The talk will provide the background for participants at this conference to engage in a Scialog process of dialog and community building leading to concrete action plans for capacity building after participants leave the conference.