Universities. The space covers 2,700 square metres that will be devoted entirely to the University's research, innovation, knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship.
Last Friday, 28 October, the President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Pere Aragonès, and the Rector of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Josep A. Planell, inaugurated the University’s Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation Hub, a new 2,700 square metre space devoted entirely to the University’s research, innovation, knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship. The event was also attended by a group of representatives from Barcelona City Council, the Catalan Minister for Research and Universities, Joaquim Nadal, the UOC’s Vice President for Strategic Planning and Research, Marta Aymerich, and various research organisations from across the country.
The relocation of the research and support groups that were located at the Parc Mediterrani de la Tecnologia in Castelldefels to the new infrastructure was thanks to the agreement reached between the UOC and Barcelona City Council at the end of 2020. With the inauguration of the new campus, the UOC has completed the concentration of its teaching, research and management assets on the Poblenou campus, in a set of three buildings in the complex of the former Can Jaumandreu textile factory in Barcelona’s 22@ digital district. The UOC also continues to maintain the building on Avinguda del Tibidabo, where the Rector’s Office is located.
The new space inaugurated on Friday 28 October is located in a four-storey building at 154 Rambla del Poblenou. The building was remodelled with the co-financing of the Generalitat de Catalunya in the call for singular institutional projects of R&D infrastructures from European funds, with an amount of 1.25 million euros.
The Hub currently houses the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), the eHealth Center (eHC), the eLearning Research Programme (eLR), the Doctoral School, the Hubbik platform for entrepreneurship and open innovation, and research management staff. In total, nearly 800 people will work there, who will also have access to the UOC Labs, an ecosystem of nine laboratories for experimentation and the provision of transversal services specialising, among others, in virtual reality, neurostimulation, social experimentation, 3D manufacturing, audiovisual innovation, data architecture and cyber-physical systems.
At the opening ceremony, President Pere Aragonès stressed that we should be proud “of all the potential behind initiatives such as the UOC’s Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation Hub. A space that has everything to bring knowledge to the surface”. The president highlighted the fact that the new complex “incorporates all the tools to promote the best research and cooperative work, sharing ideas, hypotheses and theories and boosting collective intelligence”.
For his part, the parish priest Josep A. Planell stressed that “with this new space we will promote interdisciplinary, frontier and excellent research to provide solutions in three key global axes where we have recognised experience: online learning, digital health and the network society”. He also underlined the institution’s will “that in the next 25 years research will continue to be a fundamental vector of our university”.
25th anniversary
With this event, the UOC took the opportunity to close the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the birth of the University. A trajectory that has resulted in 95,000 graduations, a faculty of 6,500 people and an international impact that, in the case of the last academic year, reached students from 141 different countries.
In terms of research and innovation, the UOC focuses on tackling today’s challenges through the study of the interaction between technology and the human and social sciences, with a specific focus on the network society, online learning and digital health. The University brings together a community of more than 500 researchers and 51 research groups articulated around the UOC’s seven departments, an e-Learning Research programme and two research centres: the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the eHealth Center (eHC). The University also promotes innovation in digital learning through the eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC) and knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship in the UOC community with the Hubbik platform.