Last week, I found myself at the campus of Texas Tech University in Costa Rica, co-facilitating a design session focused on developing an innovation center near the campus.  We had brought people from a variety of organizations in Costa Rica who are focused on building the infrastructure within the country to support and develop innovative and entrepreneurial thinkers.  We had representatives from secondary schools, technical schools, and higher education.  We had key business partners who shared their successes and failures in the recent past working to strengthen the pipeline of talent.  We had non-profit organizations who work to identify and then support students from all socioeconomic backgrounds for careers in STEM.  We had professional designers and full-time makers and tinkerers who have created spaces to share their craft.  

We had a rich conversation about what it takes to design and create an innovation space that builds individual young people’s skills while also successfully networking those young people with organizations addressing real world problems.  With the proliferation of maker spaces, innovation labs, and incubators, it can be easy to get lost in all the options.  Some of those spaces fail to live up to their potential, becoming little more than a beautifully designed space but without the energy of actual innovation and idea development.  At the Lincoln School, we are also in the process of designing and building an innovation center, and so I was eager to engage in the activity to deepen my own understanding and potentially avoid some of the common pitfalls in launching such a space.  Here are a few of the big ideas we were working with:

• The physical space itself is vanity – it’s the content of what happens in the space that matters.
• Don’t over design the space – you need an open, blank space, like a canvas
• What is the design for human attention – what human resources will be available within the space to foster and support idea development and encourage resilience in the face of challenge?
• Who is your target audience for the space, and how can you make the space inclusive and accessible?  Why would people want to spend time there?  
• Provide a mix of private and shared spaces – you need both a place for collaboration and a place to quietly work through ideas and concepts.  
• You will need more than just advanced technology (i.e. computers, 3D printers, etc.).  What about more basic technology essential to the prototyping process (i.e. sewing machines, table saws, etc.)?
• How do you build a full ecosystem to develop ideas and ventures?  How do you bring resources into the space? – i.e. organizations with real problems that need solving, office hours with legal , tax, branding, logistics, and financial experts, etc.

The tricky thing with education organizations is that we aren’t fully exposed to the harsh realities entrepreneurs and social innovators face when moving ideas and innovating outside the protected space of the classroom.  Our vision is to create an innovation space that not only equips students with the problem solving skills to identify problems around them and then design feasible solutions, but to also help them develop the resilience to move through uncertainty towards sustainable innovations that have a measurable impact on the community and world around them.