The Innovation Co-Lab provides learning opportunities, open studios, equipment resources, and mentorship to the Duke Community in support of teaching, learning, and researching with technology.

What is the Co-Lab?

The Innovation Co-Lab is a Duke Community resource for learning about, experimenting, and building with technology. We believe that Serious Play can lead to surprising results and inspiring outcomes, and have built a program to encourage and support this mentality. This includes broadly accessible learning opportunities through our Roots Program and Office Hours, four campus Studios with open access to equipment and technology support, medical-caliber equipment and services supporting the most sophisticated clinical and research needs, and deep mentorship and support opportunities for prototyping your brilliant (or wild) ideas.

A Few Principles of the Innovation Co-Lab

At the Innovation Co-Lab, we try to not only provide resources, mentorship, and support for student creativity with technology, but also build a community and environment that supports this kind of work.  To that end, we have a living set of principles that help communicate that ethos:

  • The Co-Lab is for everyone at Duke, regardless of experience, field of study, background, race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, disability, or neurodivergence.
  • Everyone can make things and creativity isn’t reserved for "creative people".
  • Everything is an experiment. Play, flow, analyze, repeat. Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time.
  • Skills tend to transfer. Previous projects have a funny way of informing unrelated future work.
  • The value of “Hello world” can't be understated – 3d printed trinkets often lead directly to published research.
  • Ask a good question today.
  • The work you do when you should be working is the work you should be doing.
  • Duke is a special place with extraordinary resources. Use them all.
  • There is great value in saying yes.