LAB42 is more than just another new building. It is meant to create a new ecosystem. 'Our mission is to do three things', says the director of the Informatics Institute Alfons Hoekstra, 'top education, top research and impactful valorisation. This is the first time we have all those three functions together in one building. The third floor houses the co-creation space. Above that, are three floors with academic research, and below are all the teaching spaces. We easily meet in this building. It feels like a unity, that we have never had before. Education and research is of course what we have traditionally been doing. The third function, valorisation is relatively new, so it is exciting to see how it will play out to have it under one roof.'