Inside a gleaming glass tower in downtown Toronto, the Parametric Human Project is building a virtual human body that can be used for medical testing instead of lab animals. Down the hall, a startup called Woodland Biofuels is developing cellulosic ethanol from forestry and farm waste. Across a bridge on the other side of an atrium, the Future Design School helps educators learn how teach skills like creativity and critical thinking; two floors down, Transpod is designing a solar-powered hyperloop.

The startups–along with researchers working on regenerative medicine, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, and corporations like Autodesk and Facebook–are tenants of the MaRS Discovery District, which calls itself the world’s largest innovation lab. The nonprofit brings together entrepreneurs working on green tech, health, fintech, and the future of work and learning, and connects them with investors, researchers, regulators, and larger companies. The premise: brilliant ideas in isolation can’t produce breakthroughs.

The leaders of the space, which first opened over a decade ago (the name stands for Medical and Related Sciences, the initial focus), think of it as the anti-Apple. If the tech giant’s new multi-billion dollar headquarters is a symbol of corporate isolation and secrecy and Silicon Valley’s tendency towards sprawl, the Canadian innovation hub is the opposite, centered in the middle of a city and built for openness.

A subway stop goes directly into the building, and a huge atrium in the middle is open to the public. Cafes throughout the space and multiple daily events are designed to increase chance meetings between stem cell engineers and AI researchers or an entrepreneur trying to reinvent healthcare.

“What’s interesting is the cross-pollination potential,” says Kousay Said, CEO of GreenMantra, a company that developed a process to convert hard-to-recycle materials like plastic bags into specialty chemicals that can be used to make products that are five times more valuable. He previously worked at Dow Chemical, where any collaboration happened with other chemists.

“We never really talked to anybody about new business models, which is really what technology companies focus on,” he says. “You look at MaRS and you’ll see technology companies, nanotechnology, biomedical. You start comparing and contrasting business models, relationships you have downstream . . .What MaRS does for us is very often creates this environment where we get together to share these experiences.”

Some companies have launched because of the founders happened to meet in the space. Proteorex, for example, a drug discovery startup, was created by two co-founders who originally worked at other companies at MaRS, met each other and began collaborating, and later won an award that funded their own lab space in the complex.