What’s the structure of Black Fire Innovation?
First of all, the basic premise of Black Fire is that a university is a truly special place. When you think about it, there is no other institution in society that touches so many vital fields that are essential in our lives. At UNLV, we have a “mini-city” of 36,000 people working on these diverse topics! So we like to say that Black Fire is a place that brings all of the wonderful resources that a university has -brilliant scientists, ground-breaking researchers, the very best student minds, terrific facilities- and takes them “out into” the business community. As a result, Black Fire stands as the heart of a proudly outward-facing campus, with nearly 100 companies working on a variety of cutting-edge projects, from artificial intelligence to health and COVID safety, to fintech and to cyber security. In contrast to a “normal” office space that these companies would occupy, our UNLV Black Fire space is quite different: while a typical landlord is passive, we are actively seeking to partner the university’s resources with these businesses, in ways that help both of us grow.
What types of companies are already participating, and which topics are being investigated and developed right now?
There are so many illustrations already, and the facility is barely a year old! For instance, Caesars Entertainment was interested in bringing their R&D team to Black Fire. We’ve partnered them with Dr. Robert Rippee, our Head of Innovation. Together, they work on things like “Co-bots”: robots that do not replace a human worker, but rather, they make a human worker’s job safer. This benefits, in turn, a brilliant Ph.D. student, Nasim Binesh, who is studying robotics and hospitality. Some of the applications include a “maid-bot” that makes a hotel room sterilized. As Nasim put it the other day, there is no better place in the world to look at the intersections of tourism and technology than Las Vegas, using the Strip as a springboard, and on projects limited only by our imagination (and of course, on occasion, budget!)
How can operators and technology companies get involved?
We always say that the best way to get involved is to come and tour the facility. There really is no space like it in the global tourism, hospitality, and gaming fields. Many mature industries boast similar partnerships; it is that our industry is such young, at least, as a regulated, globally-competitive business, so we are just starting. When you think about it, Hollywood’s film industry has tremendously productive relationships with film schools at USC and UCLA, and together, they invent the future of films that we will watch. In particular, they create the technologies and future minds that drive them. In a similar spirit, Black Fire is the global gaming-hospitality-tourism’s innovation facility, producing tech, companies, and, most importantly, people to lead companies of the future. In the end, that’s the most important “business” that we are in at UNLV: we have a sacred objective to help create the most dynamic minds in order for us to innovate our way through a complex future. The results are obvious: if you go down the Las Vegas Strip (and now, increasingly, anywhere in the gaming-hospitality world), there is a UNLV graduate in the #1, #2, or #3 leadership seat. We are very proud of that.
Do you think this institute can serve as a model for similar projects, in the USA and abroad (Latin America)?
This is a very exciting prospect. We have opened up these exact kinds of conversations with, for example, Juan Carlos Oyanedel Sepulveda at the Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile. Juan Carlos is a friend who has participated in our research conferences in the past, and he has a social sciences perspective that I find fascinating. One of the most important things that we can do at Black Fire (and, hopefully, do together with universities and industries in Latin America) is find ways to bring economic development to the neighborhoods. Very often (and I would say: too often), economic development programs overlook neighborhood-level change, when that is regularly the level where we can have immediate impacts. For instance, here in Las Vegas, we recently brought our UNLV offices to North Las Vegas, a historically disadvantaged area of the region, to ensure that we are reaching all students, and, in doing so, we are changing entire family trees. At base, the “American Dream” is one that sees people rise from relative poverty to relative health and wellbeing, but there is nothing stopping us from pursuing these dreams anywhere in the world, of course! Now that tourism is roughly 10% of the global economy, it is our obligation to help bring its benefits to the populations nearby. As always, universities are important tools to help us achieve this vision.