The goal of the workshop is to gather industry representatives, academic researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to work on concrete problems proposed by the industry. The workshop is organized by the Centre de recherches mathématiques, along with GERAD and the CIRRELT (Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation), and is sponsored by the MITACS network of centres of excellence. The participants will work in teams, and each team will analyze a problem supplied by a company or a public sector institution. The workshop will provide companies and institutions with mathematical tools for solving problems, and will enable academic researchers and students in applied mathematics to work on real-world problems.

The Montreal workshop is part of a Canadian tradition, since the PIMS Institute, based in Vancouver, started organizing Industrial Problem Solving Workshops more than ten years ago. Information on these may be found at www.pims.math.ca/industrial.

In Toronto the Fields Institute has been organizing similar workshops; more information on the 2010 workshop may be found at www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/10-11/FMIPW10.

The Canadian workshops are modelled on the "study groups" at the University of Oxford (cf. the site www.maths-in-industry.org and click here for general considerations on study groups).