School of Business Innovation Hub

The Quinnipiac University Innovation Hub provides students with a uniquely collaborative and interdisciplinary opportunity by bringing together the university’s innovation ecosystem. It serves as a runway to the workplaces and jobs of tomorrow, a place where students work with their peers from different backgrounds and interests toward a common goal. These shared experiences and relationships will prepare our students to work with colleagues from multiple departments, divisions and locations — all across the world.

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Welcome Back to the Innovation Hub

The Quinnipiac Innovation Hub buzzed with innovative business ideas and concepts during its welcome-back event.

The event — which was open to all students throughout the university — was designed to promote interdisciplinary collaboration.

“It is really cool seeing how the center operates and how they help people and will continue to do that,” said Sarah Almeida ’23, MBA ’24, a second-year 3+1 accelerated dual-degree finance and computer information systems double major, who started working at the center this semester. “Not a lot of schools have places that encourage new business ideas and help fund them to make them possible and I am so excited to be a part of this.”

The Innovation Hub plays the role of the epicenter for innovation throughout Quinnipiac. One of the partner spaces is The Maker’s Space in the School of Computing and Engineering, where students are able to use the materials to create prototypes prior to pitches.

Patrice Luoma, professor of entrepreneurship and strategy, ran the event and promoted the Innovation Hub and the 2023 QU Pitch Competition.

The collaboration of students with varying talents and interests is important for a project to be successful, Luoma pointed out. The Innovation Hub acts as the common space for the students at Quinnipiac.

Read the full story on Quinnipiac Today

The QU Innovation Hub delivers:

Dedicated spaces — physical ones and virtual ones — that encourage interdisciplinary thought across our campuses, spaces that spark exciting new ways to create 21st-century solutions
An incubator for student-driven ideas and entrepreneurial pursuits
A multidisciplinary think tank that solves real-world social, environmental and technological problems
Interprofessional partnerships, inclusive excellence and team-based practices so essential to modern careers
A nimble platform for experiential learning, a dynamic collaboration among the best and brightest at Quinnipiac
A culmination of students and faculty with diverse ideas and perspectives who create a new calculus of thinking
An outlet for innovation that inspires, excites and drives change in virtually every industry and corner of the global marketplace

People, places, projects, partners intersect at the Innovation Hub

Our Approach

Interdisciplinary Node Model

Borrowing inspiration from technology and its nomenclature, we will adopt a “Hub–Node” model that is anchored by an established central location and will be connected to contributing satellite locations (nodes) present in each school.

The School of Business serves as the hub in this model that houses a bevy of resources including:

Marketing Insights & Behavioral Research Lab
M&T Bank Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Sales Simulation Lab
Digital Workshop
Financial Technology Center

The nodes live in the other schools across our campuses. For example, the Maker Space in the School of Computing and Engineering is equipped for the ideation, design and creation of prototypes. Likewise, The Agency in the School of Communications is a full-service, student-run firm that serves the creative needs of real-world clients. Its interdisciplinary work is a model for many other schools. In North Haven, the Center for Interprofessional Healthcare Education is another example of our students and faculty working with community partners from a satellite location — a node — to develop best practices for evidence-based, coordinated and patient-centered health care.