Inside ASU’s Innovation Zones

Grace O’Sullivan (VP, Corporate Engagement & Partnerships) gives an inside look at ASU’s eight Innovation Zones, dynamic spaces where business, academia, and startups collide. She explains how these co-location hubs accelerate collaboration, research, and economic growth. With stories like Deca Technologies’ $100M CHIPS Act success, Grace illustrates how ASU transforms ideas into scalable impact.

So we have eight innovation zones across the greater Phoenix region. And that's really unique for a university. So we have these places for co-location and collaboration that real estate assets we can leverage to advance the needs of the community and the charter of the university.

So we have ones focused on health care discovery, Oasis in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, with the Phoenix Bioscience core that's also focused on health and bio sciences. It's going to be home for our ASU Health. And then we have one focused on advanced manufacturing at the Polytechnic campus. And that's a great story because it used to be an Air Force base.

And now it's reborn to be the home of the new Renaissance for U.S. advanced manufacturing. So I love that story. So we these are places for collaboration across all of them. We have over 130 tenants that are co-located with us. And when you're together like that, there are just so many opportunities to bump into each other, collide, work on research.

Students can go back and forth. So these innovation zones are really hubs for economic development and that collaboration. I'll give you one example. In one of our innovation zones, one of our oldest ones, the ASU Research Park. We have a company there called Deca Technologies. They're headquartered there. They were founded in late 2000 and theyy work on advanced packaging.

They're the most important company you've probably never heard of. And so their headquarters are in our research park. And because of that tight collaboration between ASU and DECA technologies, we were then able to win a $100 million Chips and Science Award from the U.S. government to work on advanced packaging, new techniques from lab to fab, to bring that advanced packaging technology and process back to the United States, to onshore for greater enhanced national security.

Having the entire supply chain of the semiconductor industry right here grown out of ASU and our innovation zones and Phoenix. It's just a wonderful story.