Jodi Goldstein, the managing director of Harvard’s Innovation Lab, brags that “when Zuckerberg came back to visit, he said ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have dropped out if the i-lab had existed.’” Opened in 2011—five years after Zuckerberg left Harvard to focus on theFacebook.com, an early draft of Facebook—the i-lab is 30,000 square feet of flexibly outfitted space located on Harvard’s Allston, Massachusetts, campus, replete with resources such as grants, lectures, and accelerator programs. Like Stanford’s trendsetting d.school, it is open to faculty and students from every department on campus, and is meant to foster creativity and invention—code for entrepreneurship.
Image: Students at Harvard's i-lab. (Harvard Innovation Lab/Evgenia Eliseeva)
