The Fab Foundation has approved IoBM Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) to cater to the innovative mindsets. It will provide an environment to nurture entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship initiatives. The Fab Lab at IoBM will be supervised by the Institute’s Entrepreneurship and Management Excellence Center (EMEC). It is committed to addressing the evolving challenges of research, learning, and teaching by enabling and leveraging technology. The Fab Foundation emerged in 2009 from MIT’s Center for Bits & Atoms Fab Lab Program to facilitate and support the growth of the international fab lab network. It also envisions how an underserved community can be powered by technology at the grassroots level.
IoBM Fab Lab will provide access to the tools, knowledge, and financial means to educate, innovate, and invent initiatives using technology and digital fabrication. It will allow anyone to make (almost) anything, thereby creating opportunities to improve the livelihoods of communities in Pakistan. Tufail Group, one of the largest prominent manufacturers of industrial chemicals in Pakistan, will support IoBM Fab Lab. It will provide machinery and relevant resources to execute the ideas of researchers and students. For IoBM, being part of Fab Lab means connecting to a global network of 1,750 Fab Labs of an open creative community of fabricators, artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, amateurs, and professionals located in more than 100 countries. This community is simultaneously a manufacturing network, a distributed technical education campus, and a distributed research laboratory working to digitize fabrication, inventing the next generation of manufacturing and personal fabrication.