Innovate Newport

Designing Newport’s first technology incubator space, in the transformed Sheffield School on the North side of Broadway, involved a collaboration of minds and both a public and private partnership. The design team created a cohesive strategy for achieving a high performance building.

The goal of this project was to create a spatial dynamic which encourages aspiring individuals, start-ups, and small companies to evolve their ideas from the earliest of stages into developed and implemented operations.

This was achieved through the adaptive reuse of former school spaces into flexible co-work spaces, shared conference rooms, a café/common area, “maker space,” and finally, leasable office tenant space. One of the key components to this project is that the building is outfitted with one of the fastest hard-wired internet connections in the state, usually only available to institutional/public buildings.

It is the belief of everyone involved that because of this project, there will soon be demand for more spaces of this kind in Newport.