A HUB FOR SHARED
BREAKTHROUGHS U of I Department of Computer Science takes up shop alongside tech startups in Coeur d’Alene’s Innovation Den By Brad Gary | Photos by Joe Pallen
hen an Inland Northwest medical packaging company was looking for help in further automating its production lines, it didn’t have to go far. University of Idaho computer science students happened to be studying the practice in downtown Coeur d’Alene and jumped at the chance to help eastern Washington firm Unicep with its automation lines for filling and packaging medical liquids. One Vandal student spent the summer of 2018 working with the company on the project. Amid the hoopla of aspiring technology companies and fast-paced telecommuting, the department that is part of U of I’s College of Engineering has set up shop downtown to better connect its students to the action. The department is one of about 60 tenants in the Innovation Den, the
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HERE WE HAVE IDAHO | FALL 2018
former Coeur d’Alene Elks building at 418 Lakeside Ave. that has been renovated into an incubator of sorts — complete with a coffee shop and barber on the ground floor and multiple conference rooms and public co-work spaces. In between the steel frames, exposed brick and pop art peppering the walls are offices where tech firms are trying to make a go of it and looking to each other for solutions to their logistical questions. “Entrepreneurs, startups, we’re part of that and that’s really exciting,” said Robert Rinker, associate chair of the Department of Computer Science at U of I. “We’re among them and that’s exciting because they come in and ask. We literally have drop-ins and they say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Rinker is one of four faculty members and a handful of staff who moved to the basement of the Innovation Den in September 2017 to
better connect students with entrepreneurial companies like Unicep — and potential job opportunities down the road. The Coeur d’Alene computer science program is itself a pipeline of sorts. Students complete their first two years at North Idaho College and the second two years with U of I in downtown Coeur d’Alene. The relatively new partnership is geared to house as many as 50 students in each of the two cohorts who take some classes both in the basement of the downtown location and via video conference from faculty members in Moscow. Adrian Beehner is one of those students. Beehner graduated in May 2018, receiving the first bachelor’s in computer science from the program at the Innovation Den. With tech employees stopping by to ask questions about his projects and brainstorm their own, Beehner said he