Friday, November 18, 2011

Harvard Innovation Lab opens to foster entrepreneurs

By Michelle Lang

A ribbon-cutting ceremony planned for today marks the official opening of the new Harvard Innovation Lab, which is expected to serve as a focal point for entrepreneurial activity in the Boston area.

The i-lab, as it’s been referred to, will play host today to the likes of Boston Mayor Tom Menino, Harvard University President Drew Faust and Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria.

The Allston center, located on Western Ave. in the former WGBH-TV headquarters, includes classrooms, conference rooms, offices and 5,000 square feet of open space that will support not only informal meetings but community events. The lab is part of a broader push to attract startup-minded students at Harvard Business School.  To start, the i-lab has recruited SCORE, the Small Business Administration, the Center for Women & Enterprise and the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center Network to provide help with advising, coaching and training the students, business people and entrepreneurs.

In June, i-lab director Gordon Jones led a Grillside Chat to discuss the lab, which he said would start off as industry agnostic, though in time would likely gravitate toward areas such as social media, mobile applications and non-profit initiatives. In addressing the issue of Boston-area college students taking their startup ideas to other regions, Jones said that by encouraging entrepreneurship among undergraduates and supporting those ideas there is a greater chance that students will keep their businesses in the Boston area after graduation.

“We have to support students with for-profit interests to incubate them from start toward commercialization scale, as well as students who may have not-for-profit interests,” he said at the time. “To me a home run is if we can start germinating student interest in entrepreneurship earlier, so that they can flower that much earlier whenever that entrepreneurship realization coming out is for them.”