Consistent with its original mandate, the Qualcomm Institute (QI), the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), has undertaken a major new effort to engage with industry, startups and national laboratories – by opening a new Innovation Space for them in the institute’s headquarters building on the UC San Diego campus. Select partners are invited to lease space and locate their personnel within the Qualcomm Institute Innovation Space (QIIS), offering more proximate opportunities to enable joint research projects between the private and public sector and the campus research community.

The QI Innovation Space is an environment that enables incubation and accelerates collaborative technology creation and transfer. For example, a regional or thematic national incubator could lease offices in the Innovation Space, and locate one or more of its startups that engage with UC San Diego faculty or students, or utilize campus specialized facilities. This space will also help foster collaborative creation of intellectual property (IP) involving University of California (UC) and non-UC personnel – thereby extending the prevailing base of engagement built on IP entirely generated by UC personnel and licensed to other parties.

While we hope to work closely with industry partners, the Innovation Space also aims to attract national laboratories, including those managed by the University of California, such as Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley, many of whose employees are governed by their own separate employment agreements. The labs have expressed interest in locating personnel in Atkinson Hall to enable and accelerate research partnerships with the campus, but they could also take advantage of proximity to startups and industry tenants to enable tech transfer directly from a national lab to the private sector.