Students, faculty and administrators celebrated the grand opening of the Quinnipiac Innovation Hub on Friday.

The space provides students with a uniquely collaborative and interdisciplinary opportunity by bringing together the university’s innovation ecosystem. It is intended to serve as a runway to the future workplaces and jobs, a place where students work with their peers from different backgrounds and interests toward a common goal.

The Innovation Hub is not only for business school students, it is a space for all students to come together to collaborate.

“I would like for students from all disciplines across campus to use the space,” said Patrice Luoma, professor of entrepreneurship and strategy and director of the People’s United Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “I hope that word of mouth grows that this is a space where you can work on your ideas with like-minded people and find partners to fill the skills gap that you need to turn your idea into impact. I hope the space is continually filled with students working on ideas and innovations.”

The Innovation Hub includes comfortable, yet inspirational dedicated spaces — physical and virtual — that encourage interdisciplinary thought across campuses, spaces that spark exciting new ways to create solutions for the 21st century. The branded logo was designed to include a different color dot representing each of the university’s schools.

The Innovation Hub serves as an incubator for student-driven ideas and entrepreneurial pursuits and as a multidisciplinary think-tank that solves real-world social, environmental and technological problems.

It was designed keeping in mind that interprofessional partnerships, inclusive excellence and team-based practices are highly essential to modern careers. It’s meant to be a nimble platform for experiential learning, a dynamic collaboration among the best and brightest at Quinnipiac and an outlet for innovation that inspires, excites and drives change in virtually every industry and corner of the global marketplace.

“We have always wanted an innovation space where students could meet and work on projects related to ideas and turning those ideas into businesses. Our previous space was a classroom, so the idea of the hub was to make it warm and inviting. A comfortable place to sit and work,” Luoma said. The Hub includes lockers so that those students who work on physical businesses, such as jewelry-making or clothing have a place to store their work in process.

The new Innovation Hub is the latest in a “Hub–Node” model that is anchored by an established central location and connected to contributing satellite locations (nodes) present in each school.

The School of Business serves as the hub in this model that houses a variety of other resources including: the Marketing Insights & Behavioral Research Lab, People’s United Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Sales Simulation Lab, Digital Workshop and the Financial Technology Center.

“The effort to create this new space demonstrates that Quinnipiac is serious about supporting innovation and entrepreneurship,” Luoma said. “Quinnipiac is investing in the student body to help them explore ideas, collaborate with students from other disciplines and provide unique opportunities within the university.”