Inco Innovation Centre

Construction on Memorial University’s Inco Innovation Centre continued this year with the de-construction of the former Thomson Student Centre in the heart of the St. John’s campus. Approximately 50 per cent of the 8,400 square metres of space will house a wide range of independent research and educational facilities. The remaining 50 per cent of the building will be dedicated to research on mining and processing for the Voisey’s Bay deposit - including a scale model processing plant.

Inco Ltd. has committed $13 million towards the capital cost of the facility and $1 million annually for seven years for operations and maintenance. The federal government has invested over $13 million (including $4.4 million for capital) over a five-year period through the Atlantic Innovation Fund.

Research related to the Voisey’s Bay project will be concentrated on the first floor of the building. The Geophysical Research Centre will be an environment for faculty, graduate students and professional researchers to develop commercial technologies to lower the cost of exploration, ore delineation, and mine planning. The Geochemical Research Centre will focus on research into industrial treatment of residues from hydrometallurgical processing. As with the other research centres of the IIC, researchers in the Hydrometallurgical and Process Engineering Research Centre (HPERC) will be at the forefront of international research. Their area of concentration will be hydrometallurgical refining processes associated with the Voisey’s Bay ore body.

The Early Stage Incubation Space (ESIS) is intended as dynamic space deliberately designed to enable entrepreneurs and inventors to work together with minimal management constraints to develop innovative ideas at the “fuzzy front end” of technology.

Several support facilities will be located in the Inco Innovation Centre including the School of Graduate Studies and the Office of Research. The Inco Innovation Centre will also house a project research space for community-based interdisciplinary research. The hub of the Centre is the large lecture theatre. The building will also be the home to the Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies and the Aboriginal Circle.