Innovation + Entrepreneurship
The innovation community at Penn is flourishing, and strong collaborations across Engineering, Wharton and Medicine at Penn are the driving force in these efforts. Add to this Penn Engineering’s access to outstanding mentors, a broad network of alumni, the extensive hands-on curriculum, and the growing number of cutting-edge technologies available to members of our community and it comes as no surprise that the amount of technologies conceived at Penn Engineering is increasing rapidly.
The Pennovation Center
The Pennovation Center, the hub for Penn’s innovation, entrepreneurship and technology transfer efforts, is 58,000-square-feet of space that has been completely transformed to foster new connections between Penn researchers and industry members by putting wet labs, co-working desks, meeting spaces and corporate offices in close proximity. New companies born from these interactions can rent “startup garages” on the first floor as they grow their nascent businesses.
The Penn Engineering Research and Collaboration Hub, or PERCH, is one of the Pennovation Center’s first occupants. Organized under inaugural director Daniel Koditschek, Alfred Fitler Moore Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering, PERCH brings together three core research groups from Penn Engineering’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab. Together, the Kod*Lab, the ModLab and the Multi-Robot Systems Lab, as well as researchers working in embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT), are situated above an incubator for spin-off companies, with an eye toward advancing new academic developments into the public pipeline.