Urban Innovation Hubs

IE Center for the Governance of Change and IE School of Architecture & Design organized a conversation on Urban Innovation Hubs with Harvard Researchers Jeremy Burke and Ramon Gras. With the support of Cristina Mateo, IE School of Architecture and Design Executive Director, these experts shared their work on how innovation districts operating in synergy with innovation hubs can unleash latent economic forces in society, thus generating high quality employment opportunities, contributing to sustained periods of distributed prosperity.

Jeremy Burke and Ramon Gras shared their research on how Complexity Science and Network Theory-driven Machine Learning mathematical models can be deployed to support Urban Design criteria, by liberating the potential non-linear benefits of strategic aggregation of talent and knowledge-intensive activities in Innovation Campuses, operating in synergy with high value-added export hubs within metropolitan areas.

The speakers have spent the past two years developing tools, data sets, adaptable models, and a dynamic, analytical framework to support more robust, place-based decision making. While their focus has been on Massachusetts, their techniques are applicable broadly.