Red River College forges ahead with new Innovation Centre

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This article was published 12/09/2017 (3006 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Less than five months after Red River College initially announced plans to build a $95 million Innovation Centre just north of its Princess Street campus, site preparations for the building are already underway.

The 100,000 square foot development will incorporate an existing building located across the street from the Roblin Centre on the north side of Elgin Street — the 100 year-old three-storey Scott Fruit Building which has heritage building status.

But the neighbouring building to the west of Scott Fruit, the former Metro Motors, is in the process of being demolished.

“We are moving very quickly,” said Red River College president Paul Vogt. “We are now in the design stage and we expect to be building within 12 months.”

The aggressive schedule is partly driven by some of the conditions attached to the $41 million worth of funding RRC received for the project from the federal government through its post-secondary institutions strategic investment fund (SIF).

The balance of the cost of the development of the building is coming from a $55 million provincial government loan. To pay that loan back RRC is embarking on the largest capital campaign in the college’s history.

“We are excited about it but we’re also going into it with some nervousness,” Vogt said. “It will be a big challenge for us.”

RRC just recently assigned the contract for the architectural design to a consortium including Winnipeg’s Number Ten Architectural Group and a Toronto firm called Diamond Schmitt who are specialists in designing educational spaces similar to the ones that will be created for the Innovation Centre.

The idea is to create open classrooms suitable for teams of students working together that will also be convenient for industry and social services partners who will need to be present for varying periods of time.

“At this stage in our evolution we are going to a much more collaborative way of teaching where we are working directly with industry,” Vogt said.

RRC is calling the open teaching areas “collision” spaces. It is an approach to teaching that is being done elsewhere. For instance, the architectural firm, Diamond Schmitt has designed similar spaces already for Ryerson University and Algonquin College in Ontario.

“It’s not like we are inventing this,” said Vogt. “We believe it will be the only way we can keep up with the evolution that is taking place in the workplace.”

Vogt also believes that employers will appreciate the significance of the changes taking place and the college’s preparedness to embrace that and one way or another many of them are going to be asked to help fund the development via the capital campaign.

Vogt does not believe there will any cause for institutional ethical concerns of having the private sector investing in a college development that the private sector employer may very well benefit from.

“It is going to set us up to be more responsive to changes taking place in the workplace in real time,” he said. “The business community and employers generally are very supportive of that. We feel that there is a lot interest and enthusiasm in what Red River is doing.”

The capital campaign is expecting to tap many of the employers who count on RRC producing potential workers with the right skill sets, but Vogt is not worried about conflicts or even the appearance of conflicts of interest.

“We don’t see it that way,” he said. “Everything we do is actually industry or employer driven. Our programs are meant to provide students with skills to be able to hit the ground running when they start a job. We have always seen ourselves as driven by partners and employers.”

He notes that whereas research at universities is a combination of industry-led and pure research, at RRC there is only applied research so there is really no chance to be unduly influenced because those kinds of partnerships are what the college is all about.

“All we do is applied research that is industry led,” he said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca