University of Illinois officials hope to close in late October or early November on the $950,000 acquisition of a downtown Springfield building at 401 E. Washington St. that will house the UIS Innovation Center.
“I’m very confident it will help grow our economy significantly,” said Bruce Sommer, University of Illinois Springfield’s director of economic development and innovation. “A really big and significant goal is to attract and retain talent here in Springfield. We hope that this state-of-the art innovation space will do that.”
The university’s Board of Trustees approved the purchase of the three-story, 26,400-square-foot building in July from the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association.
The association and some other commercial clients use the building but will move when about $15 million in renovations are expected to begin in February or March of 2024, Sommer said. The future home of the sheriffs’ association hasn’t been finalized, association executive director Jim Kaitschuk said.
University officials said the building, four blocks northeast of the Capitol, will serve central Illinois as part of the university system’s Illinois Innovation Network. Officials said in a news release that the building will be a “regional center for technology and research commercialization, business incubation and acceleration, workforce development and policy research.”
The building will also be the new home of Innovate Springfield, a business incubator that Sommer helped spearhead seven-and-a-half years ago and now has 90 members. The incubator became part of UIS in 2018 and currently operates out of rented space at 15 S. Old State Capitol Plaza.
Membership in Innovate Springfield has been growing at 20% per year, Sommer said. More than one-third of the incubator’s members are women, and 37% are minorities.
Among the 36% of members who provided data for Innovate Springfield’s 2021 Economic Impact Survey, the businesses represented employed 276 people, with 186 of them full-time and 90 part-time. The businesses reported gross revenues of $19 million in 2021, which was a 21% increase from 2020.
The new building, where renovations are expected to conclude in late 2024, will double Innovate Springfield’s capacity to develop new businesses and launch a startup accelerator, University of Illinois officials said.
An architect and general contractor for the project haven’t yet been chosen, but plans call for the site to include a “makerspace” where prototypes of products can be produced and bench laboratory work can be conducted, Sommer said.
“We’re hoping to attract a group of entrepreneurs that we can’t currently provide space for,” he said.
The UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership will have a significant presence in the building in a “public policy space where we’ll have our public policy faculty engaging with community members and state legislators to hopefully create a more efficient and effective government,” Sommer said.
The building’s proximity to the Capitol and to state legislators will be ideal for public-policy seminars and meetings, he said.
The center also will serve as a hub for collaboration to “help build capacity to nonprofits in our area and potentially across the state,” he said. The university said in the news release that there will be “collaborative space for philanthropies, social-service agencies, faculty researchers, students and lawmakers to analyze and implement strategies for the advancement of social progress.”
Classroom space in the building will be for UIS students taking courses related to nonprofits, businesses and entrepreneurship, and the university president will have office space there.
“We hope this creates an anchor for other developments, including other innovation activity in that area,” Sommer said.
At one point, university officials thought the innovation center might be housed in a new building that would be constructed on the city-owned Y Block immediately north of the Executive Mansion on a 2.25-acre lot. That land has been vacant since the YWCA building was torn down in 2017.
Discussions surrounding a presence by UIS and Southern Illinois University on the block slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the university wanted to move forward at another downtown site to make sure the $15 million wouldn’t be lost to other priorities of the state, Sommer said.
The funding is part of $500 million appropriated during the administration of former Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, and reappropriated during the administration of Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, for the university’s innovation network, Sommer said.
The network has 15 different hubs associated with various four-year public higher education institutions. The regional hubs include sites in Normal, Peoria, Urbana-Champaign, Edwardsville and Carbondale.
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer for Illinois Times. He can be reached at dolsen@illinoistimes.com, 217-679-7810 or twitter.com/DeanOlsenIT.
This article appears in Regan Deering takes on Nikki Budzinski.
