Developers of Innovation Campus building draw inspiration from tech, social-media HQs – Lincoln Journal Star

Even before the Lincoln City Council considers a redevelopment plan request from Nebraska Innovation Campus to begin the next phase of construction at the research park, interest in the 80,000-square-foot building has been high, particularly among entrepreneurs.

What we have a lot of demand for is 200- to 500- to 1,000-square-foot offices for companies that are just kind of getting going, said Dan Duncan, executive director of Nebraska Innovation Campus.

Small space is difficult to come by in the commercial real estate world, which typically caters to larger, more-established companies looking to rent entire floors rather than individual office suites.

The latest building planned for Innovation Campus a proposed $15.3 million facility (with an estimated $3.1 million in tax-increment financing) privately funded by Tetrad Property Group is a clean slate for the lead developer.

The first phase of construction at the research park focused on transforming the Industrial Arts Building and the 4-H Building icons from the days of the Nebraska State Fair into offices, laboratories and conference halls.

Two additional facilities Innovation Commons and the Plant Innovation Center were designed to connect to those structures both architecturally and conceptually, with specific needs in mind.

Targeted for a space to the north and east of the corner of 21st Street and Transformation Drive, the still-unnamed, mixed-use office building will shed the constraints that the first wave of projects were built under.

Drawing from ideas gleaned during tours of Pinterest, DropBox and others tech companies, the new design is set up to be a more modern take on office space, according to Josh Berger, Tetrads director of operations.

The team representing Innovation Campus connected with University of Nebraska-Lincoln alumni at tech companies and research parks in San Francisco and Toronto including Apple and Google to learn what Duncan called spaces younger people, especially, will want to work in.

A big takeaway from the trip was a design featuring an innovative hub to serve mid-sized companies relocating to Lincoln, as well as small companies and startups spun off from UNL seeking to grow out of single offices.

The goal is to create a space that is both an asset in business recruitment, as well as fully functional as a workplace for Innovation Campus partners.

Obviously, we cant copy everything thats being done, but if we could take a few key pieces and replicate those, it helps us with recruiting companies, he said. That in turn parlays into those companies recruiting employees when they are here on campus.

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Duncan said the new building will be built to quickly adapt to the needs of tenants, including anchor tenants and the dozens of companies they are in talks with at any given time.

They are going to build that space out with an open concept that is easy to put walls in so, number one, we can get people in quickly, and, number two, we can have multiple sizes of offices, Duncan said.

About 370 full-time workers, plus some 100 part-timers and interns, are employed at the research park. Students enrolled in food science courses at UNL add to the activity there, along with creative projects at the Innovation Studio and dozens of conferences each year in the conference center.

Later this summer, The Mill will add a coffee shop and bistro and continue to demonstrate the campus is open for business, Duncan said.

Were getting to that critical mass where it helps, he said.

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Developers of Innovation Campus building draw inspiration from tech, social-media HQs - Lincoln Journal Star