A design for 21st Century Innovation

With Innovista, the University of South Carolina and its partnering private interests are offering a forward-looking approach—one that will set the standard for research campus design for the next 100 years as it creates a magnet for attracting the world’s brightest minds and most innovative companies to South Carolina.

Together, we’re building more than a research campus. With Innovista, we’re building a thriving intellectual ecosystem, and we’re intertwining it with South Carolina’s capital city. Architecturally and environmentally the two will be virtually indistinguishable.

Spreading out over 200 acres and combining 5 million square feet of research labs, office space, mixed-use retail and affordable residential housing, this stimulating innovation district illustrates how private interests and institutions of higher learning can work in concert to strengthen the technology base and advance the economic development of a city, a region, and a state by creating a center point for inventiveness with an inspiring, interesting lifestyle for those living and working there.

Our vision is urban—with faculty and private researchers and their families living next to, or over, where they work. And only a short walk or bike ride from parks, restaurants, entertainment, shopping, schools, and recreation.

A mixture of high-density, high-tech workplaces and medium density-housing, Innovista will be a vibrant part of the city fabric stretching from downtown Columbia to the shores of the gently flowing Congaree River, which creates the western most edge of this “I” district.

A major Innovista element is the focus on research aimed at the emerging technologies and intellectual clusters—Biomedical, Environmental, Nanotechnology, and Future Fuels—that companies will find extremely valuable in the global economy.