The Innovation Co-Lab

The Manchester Institute of Innovation Research is a founding member of the Innovation Co-Lab.

A composite image of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Beijing Institute of Technology logos.

The Innovation Co-Lab is an international virtual e-lab partnership for advancing methods and analysis in emerging science, technology and innovation. In addition to MIOIR, the other founding members are the Program in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) at Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) and the Laboratory of Knowledge Discovery, School of School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), China. The Innovation Co-Lab’s international network also includes colleagues from Fudan University, China; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; the University of Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK; and the Intelligent Information Services Corporation, Atlanta, USA. The Innovation Co-Lab was founded in 2011 with British Council seed funding support.

The activities of the Innovation Co-Lab involve virtual and on-site research collaboration, academic exchanges, joint student training, and dissemination. Graduate students and researchers from Innovation Co-Lab members and associates have been hosted in Manchester, while staff and students from MIOIR have visited Co-Lab members. A series of major projects have been undertaken, including Sustaining Growth for Innovative New Enterprises in the UK, US, and China, and Emerging Technologies, Trajectories and Implications of Next Generation Innovation Systems Development in China and Russia; conferences and workshops have been organized in the UK and China; and collaborative publications have been produced. A current theme of collaboration is AI (including AI in the lab and AI innovation ecologies).

The directors of the Innovation Co-Lab are Prof Philip Shapira (MIOIR), Dr Jan Youtie (Georgia Tech), and Prof Donghua Zhu (BIT).