Cleveland Institute of Art hopes $13M media lab sparks creative, business growth

By Joe Scalzo, Crain's Cleveland Business

[Cleveland Institute of Art's] Interactive Media Lab (IML) is a 14,300-square-foot, $13 million addition to the Cleveland Foundation's MidTown Collaboration Center (MCC), a 98,000-square-foot building in the Hough Neighborhood.

The MCC, about a 10-minute drive from CIA’s campus in University Circle, is operated by JumpStart, which is headquartered just across the hall from the IML. The building also houses organizations like Hyland Software, Assembly for the Arts, University Hospitals, and several centers from Case Western Reserve University, making it a hub for cross-sector collaboration in health care, technology and the arts.

That’s exactly the kind of company CIA wants to keep.

“We’re already seeing cross-sector innovation starting to happen by way of creative collisions and unplanned serendipitous moments,” said Kathryn Heidemann, president and CEO of CIA. “What we have to see in Cleveland is more of those cross-sector collisions working and us working together — and not just within our own echo chamber of arts and culture or even education. What might it look like when we expand ourselves and open ourselves to the medical community, technology community, other public sectors and so on?”

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