The Philadelphia Education Research Consortium (PERC) was launched in July 2014 as an innovative place-based consortium of educational research partners from multiple sectors. Its primary objective is to provide research and analyses on some of the city's most pressing education issues. As such, PERC's research agenda is driven by both traditional public and charter schools within the City of Philadelphia, and is executed through research partners at Research for Action, an independent educational research organization, and the city's three major research universities (Temple University, Drexel University, and the University of Pennsylvania). This paper details the process by which PERC selected and executed its first research project: an in-depth analysis of how best to apply the emerging concept of Blended Learning to Philadelphia school contexts. The guiding research question for this paper is the following: How does an urban educational research consortium fill existing gaps in district/charter capacity for conducting applied research by establishing working relationships with practitioners and drawing on the deep pool of research talent that already exists in the area? To address this question, the paper details the structure of PERC, as well as the specific process by which researchers approached the blended learning research project. It also identifies a set of indicators that can be used to gauge the degree to which PERC has established strong, trusting relationships leading to a high level of utility and relevance. The hope is that an exploration of PERC's innovative research consortium model in the first year of its implementation can be instructive for similar endeavors in urban settings.