Penn to celebrate South Bank innovation at Friday forum

Innovation: Penn sees it as essential to its future, and for the past few years has been developing a way to institutionalize this type of progress.

For Penn, the culmination of that development is the University’s new South Bank campus and its Pennovation Center, an incubator for University-related businesses.

On Friday, Penn will host a Silfen Forum celebrating the ceremonial groundbreaking of the new Pennovation Center, which has been four years in the making. The University purchased the South Bank’s 23 acres of land for $13 million in 2010, and is now investing approximately $35 million to upgrade the site with new utilities and build the 52,000 square foot Pennovation Center.

At Friday’s forum , Penn President Amy Gutmann will interview author Walter Isaacson about innovation across societies. Issacson, who wrote Steve Jobs’ and Benjamin Franklin’s biographies, will talk about his new book on innovation — “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.”

In addition to the forum, professors from all four of Penn’s undergraduate schools will present “Pennovation talks” about topics ranging from robotics surgery to Alzheimer’s as an infectious disease. The main goal of the event is to showcase the South Bank campus , located at 34th Street and Gray’s Ferry Avenue, to the Penn community through lectures and tours of the campus. Free transportation to the South Bank campus will be offered through Penn Transit.

The Pennovation Center will be the centerpiece of the South Bank campus, the University’s hub for innovation and development. The main goal for the campus is to attract innovators both in education and in the private sector onto campus.

In keeping with that goal, Penn has already settled the newly developed South Bank campus with several companies. These include:  Novapeutics, a diabetes treatment company; KMel Robotics, a company run by 2011 Penn alumni Alex Kushleyev and Daniel Mellinger that builds flying robots; Edible Philly magazine publishing and The Philadelphia Free Library archives.

Penn Engineering’s GRASP Lab, the robotic arm of the Engineering School, will also be expanding innovation into the South Bank. Current projects include a computer program that is intended for self-driving cars, the creation of tiny mechanical fingers to aide in surgery and bacteria powered nano-motors.

The South Bank campus will also host many University programs, such as  PCI Ventures, which offers resources and advice  to entrepreneurs associated with Penn,  Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine Working Dog Center, the School of Dental Medicine’s Research Greenhouse and the School of Arts and Sciences’ Bio Garden.

Correction: A previous version of this article unclearly stated that Penn has lined up companies to settle the South Bank. The companies and programs listed are already tenants of the South Bank campus.

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