At Illinois Tech, energy innovation and
entrepreneurship have new home
PHOTO BY
Steve Hall / Hall
& Merrick
With a collaborative approach, the center’s leader aims to
foster the development of ambitious clean energy solutions.
Illinois
Institute of Technology opened the doors to a 70,000-square-foot, $37 million
innovation center last month that will be home to ambitious industrial
collaborations, where engineering students will partner with faculty and
businesses to collaborate on big-picture ideas — from electric cars and grid
management to the internet of things.
Leading
the project is Howard Tullman, Chicago’s serial entrepreneur and longtime
leader of 1871, another innovation center. He said
that some of the highest priorities for the collaborative projects will be
around the development of clean energy technology.
“We
think that this center is a place to generate new ideas in the energy field and
combine the students, the faculty, and industry,” Tullman said. “We think that
the desire to support some of these things is out there in industry.”
‘We
think that this center is a place to generate new ideas in the energy field and
combine the students, the faculty, and industry.’
The Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech
Entrepreneurship is a futuristic building wrapped in several
layers of an innovative material that
help control how much energy is used and manage sunlight
into the center.
In the
past, Tullman has said that the school will be training people for careers that
don’t yet exist, using technology that will be invented on the new campus. But
what are some of the problems keyed up to solve?
Tullman
said one is finding a clean solution for the so-called last-mile problem — the
short trip from the subway or bus station to the pharmacy or grocery store.
Tullman is looking for “a zero-carbon footprint to move people to hospital
appointments and back, and to do all these last-mile things,” he said.
It’s a
local problem for IIT and the surrounding community. In August, the Chicago
Transit Authority announced that
it was ending a bus pilot along 31st Street, a route that serviced a small
group of students and seniors. Tullman believes that 31st Street could be an
ideal testing area for autonomous electric vans.
“They
would serve our students and our campus and connect the Metra and the CTA to larger
parts of the Bronzeville community,” he said. “My interest is in these
transportation solutions. But separately, we’re also looking at how do we
generate and share excess capacity that we will have on campus with the rest of
the Bronzeville grid.”
Tullman
also wants to continue to develop solar generation around campus. IIT has solar
panels on campus already, and Tullman said solar production will continue to
grow. “The whole Kaplan roof, which is flat — I am lobbying for
deployment of additional solar panels up there.”
Clean energy entrepreneurship
IIT, a
private university focused on technology, has long been considered a top school
for engineering, design, and science training — but it hasn’t built a new
academic building in about 40 years. So why now?
One
reason: money and resources are being quickly spent on a clean energy
renaissance in Illinois. In 2016, the legislature passed the Future Energy Jobs
Act with the goal of procuring 666 megawatts of community and distributed
solar. In April, the Illinois Power Agency detailed a plan to
acquire 25 percent of state energy from renewables by 2025.
These
targets signal that Illinois is fertile ground for innovative startups, and
Tullman wants Kaplan students to be leading these companies. IIT students will
now be trained in executive-level management skills on top of the technical and
engineering skills. “There’s no central venue where students come to be
instructed in tomorrow skills — whether it’s iteration, problem-solving, the
process of design thinking — and we want that to be Kaplan’s signature, a place
where these interdisciplinary problems can also be addressed,” Tullman said.
The
goal of instruction at Kaplan is to train students to innovate and to become
leading entrepreneurs. “We’re not going to solve a lot of the problems that
have accumulated by doing things the same way we always have,” Tullman said.
‘We’re
not going to solve a lot of the problems that have accumulated by doing things
the same way we always have.’
The
school is pumping a lot of oxygen into its professional partnerships, a key
component of new academic programming meant to train the next generation of
leaders; many who will be focused on developing a cleaner and smarter energy
grid.
Alumni
over the past decade have left IIT earning more than graduates of comparable
schools in the region like Northwestern University and Notre Dame. “But years
out, they cap out because they’re not seen as executive-level talent,” Tullman
said. “They’re seen as great coders, great scientists, or whatever. But if you
look at the world history of business, the single most prominent sort of
undergraduate degree of CEOs across the country is in engineering. We’re sort
of missing out on something which means we aren’t giving our graduates the
total package that lets them aspire to these executive jobs.”
The
business community is already working with Kaplan students on interdisciplinary
projects, which Tullman said are filling a need for long-term, off-balance
sheet research and development.
Typically,
research and development project managers must report quarterly to a company’s
leadership team, and the pressure to make money can be a deterrent to working
on big problems that aren’t easily solved. Engineering new technology will be
at the heart of solving these problems — to a much greater extent than it has
been in the past, he said.
Location
helps too: IIT is located in Bronzeville, a neighborhood on Chicago’s Southside
that is home to a burgeoning clean technology
hub. Here, clean energy projects are abundant, including the
first utility-scale
clustered microgrid, which is being developed by IIT and ComEd,
the largest utility in Illinois; and a sun-tracking “smartflower”
at the Renaissance Collaborative, an affordable housing center.
“Companies
don’t have an appetite for hiring people to pursue some of these things,”
Tullman said. “But the projects here aren’t under such intense profit and loss
pressure. I think that you’re going to see a lot of projects spawned in this
environment, which is a little more hospitable to the kinds of time frames that
these solutions are going to take. Every 90 days somebody isn’t saying: ‘have
we struck gold yet?’”
Already,
100 graduate students are working from the Kaplan Center; the graduate design
program moved in last month. Tullman said the interdisciplinary projects are
beginning. The building will be fully operational in January.
Inside the Kaplan Institute
The new
innovation hub at Illinois Tech promises to be a place where “students learn to
be the creators, inventors, and entrepreneurs of the future.”
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