Two new Philadelphia initiatives are underway, with related missions for supporting the city’s rapidly expanding innovation ecosystem, entrepreneurship and business development.
The City of Philadelphia's new Innovation Lab is a state-of-the-art 1,600-square-foot space modeled after the research-and-development and co-working facilities found in the private sector and academia. The lab, which overlooks City Hall, provides a central space and technology resources to host classes, meetings, workshops, hackathons and more; it will hopefully encourage collegiality, innovating thinking and creative problem solving in an atmosphere new to City government.
“The Innovation Lab serves as an important symbol to all stakeholders that we are truly in the innovation business,” says City Managing Director Richard Negrin, whose office initiated and oversees the lab as part of a larger emphasis on innovation.
Meanwhile, a few miles away in West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania has launched its Penn Center for Innovation, a new initiative to provide the infrastructure, leadership and resources needed to transfer promising Penn-developed research, inventions and technologies into the marketplace.
“Most major universities have technology transfer practices that focus predominantly on patenting and licensing,” says John Swartley, the new center’s executive director and Penn’s associate vice provost for research. “As we have become more involved in advancing technologies into the development sphere, we’ve also started to engage more and more in complementary activities such as new venture creation and corporate partnering around collaboratively sponsored research projects. What we’ve decided to do at Penn is to combine all those activities into a single organization — to be a one-stop shop for our faculty, staff and students as well as members of the private sector.”
Source: Philadelphia Office of the Managing Director and the University of Pennsylvania
Writer: Elise Vider