According to Tim Gorman, Associate Director of the Verizon Innovation Program, the program’s broad set of offerings is one of the reasons that the company operates two innovation centers, in Waltham, Mass. and San Francisco.
“A lot of of visitors don’t really have a sense of the wide range of assets that we have within the portfolio,” says Gorman, who oversees both centers. “A lot of what we’re doing here is to expose those technologies and how [our visitors] can integrate those technologies to innovate and deliver something new to their customers.”
In these centers, Verizon invites its customers or potential collaborators in to experience the company’s innovations and find opportunities for partnership.
“The centers really serve as a window into innovation at Verizon,” says Gorman. “We work with small, medium, and large companies that are really focused on accelerating the commercialization of their devices. It could be a router, a security camera, anything [that somebody] wants to embed cellular connectivity into.” And given the increasing number of products with some kind of Internet link built in, the level of activity at both innovation centers has been increasing.
Gorman gave us a tour inside the Innovation Center in Waltham, Mass., just outside Boston, and discussed its objectives.
When giving tours of the Innovation Center, there are a variety of demos that showcase how some of Verizon’s solutions work — or might work in the future. The video below shows an augmented reality demo that showcases some of Verizon’s “smart communities and venue solutions.”
