Emerson Climate Technologies, St. Louis, Mo., opened the doors to The Helix Innovation Center at Georgia Tech, a new collaboration and innovation space located in Technology Square, the university’s innovation hub in Atlanta. This location will serve as the focal point of Emerson’s development and collaboration on big data and Internet of Things (IoT) concepts, and will focus on HVACR industry markets, including supermarket refrigeration, foodservice operations, data center cooling, industrial refrigeration and light commercial buildings.

“Our investment in this collaboration and innovation space is a key part of our strategy to build relationships with academics, students, technology leaders and entrepreneurs. We want to create the right environment and culture for innovation to address industry challenges and better serve our customers,” says Mark Dunson, group vice president, electronics and solutions.

The Helix Innovation Center is a nearly 1,600-square-foot facility featuring the latest technology for effective in-person and virtual collaboration.  

Activities will include internal and customer ideation sessions, community and student engagements like hack-a-thons and challenge and prototype creation for product development. Early projects already completed at the Georgia Tech facility include multiple industry and product ideation sessions, reviews of new technology and entrepreneurial concepts, early development of advanced components for Emerson building management systems and student engagements in research projects and prototyping product concepts.

 Emerson will employ approximately a dozen people in The Helix Innovation Center; roughly half will be employees who rotate through from other Emerson locations.  

The Georgia Tech facility will work in concert with The Helix Innovation Center at the University of Dayton, which opened in April. The Dayton innovation center, located in a nearly 40,000-square-foot facility, fosters an ambitious, collaborative approach to conducting research to create new technologies that address heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVACR) industry challenges. 

This new site expands Emerson’s global network of innovation facilities focused on climate solutions, including The Helix Innovation Center at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, The Europe Solution Center in Aachen, Germany, and The Emerson Innovation Centre in Pune, India.