Oklahoma City celebrates the opening of Innovation District with ribbon cutting

OKLAHOMA CITY—Oklahoma City officials on Thursday held a ribbon cutting ceremony in the Innovation District, showcasing biotech-centered facilities.

In Innovation Hall, you can see BioTC, a lab that will soon have students from Oklahoma City for a short course before they can find biotech jobs.

In the Innovation District, one of the biggest parts of their mission is to plug into the workforce.

“It serves as Oklahoma City’s living room for science, innovation and community engagement,” said Jeff Seymour, president of OKC Innovation District.

The Convergence Tower and the Innovation Hall, together with their opening mark the beginning of the new district.

At Innovation Hall and Convergence Tower, a huge focus will be on the bio industry. Whether that's cutting-edge advancements of teaching the next workforce in labs.

“First and foremost, we want to get innovation hall right. We want to make sure that it’s accessible to the community," said Seymour.

“Innovation District is much more than just this parcel, but a growing and thriving innovation districts needs some new buildings,” said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt.

Innovation Hall is the first completed MAPS 4 project.

Convergence Tower will host diverse businesses focused on innovation and its next-door neighbor is set to bolster their workforce.

“This is a training center that’s going to be utilized here in OKC to train bio lab jobs, analytics lab jobs, and biomanufacturing,” said Koey Keylon, executive director of BioTC. “We’ve got the most state of the art, the newest most state-of-the-art technologies.”

They already have students using microscopes with their work projected right next to them and then that work moves over to an even bigger screen to teach the whole class.

“Also, the ability to use really tech-enabled conference rooms to do a client pitch or have a strategic planning conversation or meet with a neighborhood group,” said Seymour.

An while a big part of the mission are the bio labs, officials said they're looking to innovate in other places, too.

“Longer term? I think there’s a lot of other clusters we could be having the same conversation about. For us, we know that the aerospace and defense cluster and the transportation, technology cluster is probably the next big thing that this community has that we could leverage," Seymour said. “We think OKC as a whole from an innovation economy has a really bright future, we think Northeast Oklahoma City is a really important part of that, but we wanna make sure that we’re helping think through the next and logical steps."

People will soon be able to apply to learn at the labs, you can click here for more information.