Innovation - Enterprise Innovation Institute

Honeywell Joins Atlanta-Based Engage to Help City Grow as a Leading Innovation Hub

Honeywell Connected Enterprise President and CEO Que Dallara joins Engage’s Board of Directors.

Honeywell announced today it has joined Atlanta-based Engage, a collaborative innovation and corporate venture platform that is dedicated to promoting the city as a technology hub. Honeywell Connected Enterprise is based in Midtown Atlanta and is one of the city’s leading businesses in the enterprise software industry.

Honeywell and other leading Atlanta companies in Engage are helping high-growth startups accelerate their enterprise go-to-market strategies through collaboration with Fortune 500 organizations. As an Engage partner, Honeywell will work with entrepreneurs who are developing new business ideas and participate in its bi-annual Enterprise Go-To-Market program. Additionally, getting plugged into this innovation ecosystem will create experiences for Honeywell employees to advance their entrepreneurial capability and gain exposure to leading innovators, top researchers, and ambitious startup founders.

“Honeywell is proud to call Atlanta home for our software business, and we share a common goal with Engage in helping businesses grow through new technology,” said Que Dallara, president and CEO of Honeywell Connected Enterprise. “We believe this is an important partnership to assist organizations here and in the surrounding region as Atlanta rapidly expands as an innovation hub.”

In addition to Honeywell Connected Enterprise’s investment into the Engage Venture Fund that is managed by Tech Square Ventures to support the Engage program, Dallara will join Engage’s board of directors. Usman Shuja, vice president and general manager of Connected Buildings, will become a member of the advisory board.

“Honeywell is a leading innovator in enterprise software and brings valuable leadership, future-forward ideas, and strategic execution to Engage,” said Daley Ervin, Engage managing director. “We are looking forward to the expertise that Honeywell will bring to our network of senior executives and entrepreneurs working together in the pursuit of industry-changing technology.”

“Supporting startups and entrepreneurs through Engage is an opportunity for Honeywell to invest in Atlanta’s innovation ecosystem,” Shuja said. “By advising and partnering with some of nation’s newest transformative companies, we aspire to help them become well positioned for long-term growth. We believe the success of these new startups will strengthen the city’s international leadership as a center for innovation, particularly in the software and technology industries.”

By partnering with Engage, startups and entrepreneurs gain fresh insights to help them better achieve their strategic goals, understand new growth opportunities, and explore solutions to key business challenges. Engage also provides entrepreneurs with access to new customers and markets.

“As a founding partner of the Engage program, Georgia-Pacific is pleased to see the continued commitment by leading enterprises to work with startups and grow the entrepreneurial ecosystem,” said Engage board member Jim Hannan, Koch Industries executive vice president and CEO-Enterprises. “With Honeywell joining the platform, Engage will further accelerate its mission of strengthening corporate connectivity and fueling economic development across Atlanta and the Southeast.”

About Honeywell
Honeywell (www.honeywell.com) is a Fortune 100 technology company that delivers industry-specific solutions that include aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings and industry; and performance materials globally. Our technologies help aircraft, buildings, manufacturing plants, supply chains, and workers become more connected to make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable. For more news and information on Honeywell, please visit www.honeywell.com/newsroom.

About Engage
Based in Georgia Tech’s Technology Square, Engage is a first-of-its-kind collaborative innovation and corporate venture platform where category-leading corporations in the Southeast have joined forces to support startups building the future of enterprise. Engage partners include Chick-fil-A, The Coca-Cola Company, Cox Enterprises, Delta Air Lines, Georgia-Pacific, Georgia Power Foundation, Georgia Tech, Goldman Sachs, The Home Depot, Honeywell Connected Enterprise, Inspire Brands, Intercontinental Exchange, Invesco, Invest Georgia, Tech Square Ventures, UPS, and Wellstar Health System. The Engage Fund is managed by Tech Square Ventures. As an affiliate of Georgia Tech, a top 10 public research technology and commercialization university, Engage has direct access to Tech’s startup, innovation, and research initiatives. Learn more about Engage at engage.vc.

Wellstar invests in Engage corporate venture platform to fuel innovation

Innovation is vital to the Wellstar mission, says Candice Saunders (pictured), the health system’s president and CEO.

Building on a rich history of innovation and impact in healthcare delivery, Wellstar Health System has launched Catalyst by Wellstar^TM, a global digital health and innovation center.

As part of the center’s work, Wellstar has partnered with corporate innovation and venture platform Engage to connect and collaborate with industry-leading corporations, enterprise startups, and universities to fuel innovation. To foster meaningful discussion, action, and philanthropy around healthcare innovation, the Catalyst by Wellstar leadership team will participate in a Wellstar Foundation-hosted Innovation Series virtual event on June 15.

Catalyst by Wellstar is the first-of-its-kind global digital health and innovation center created and operated within a health system to holistically address healthcare disruption by harnessing problems, solutions, investments, and partnerships across industries. The center defines and drives leading-edge, transformative solutions that enhance the health and well-being of people and communities with world-class results and impact.

As technology continues to advance and consumers become more empowered by digital solutions and information access, innovation to solve problems and seize opportunities will evolve and impact how healthcare is delivered and used. Wellstar is committed to transforming healthcare through problem sourcing from patients, community members, physicians and team members, and partners to lead mission-driven innovation. Catalyst by Wellstar is designed to harness, accelerate, optimize, and scale people-centric solutions that:

Disrupt how Wellstar delivers care to create better patient and provider experiences.
Maximize quality and safety to improve outcomes while reducing the total cost of care.
Enhance health and well-being for people through access, engagement, and empowerment.
Optimize enterprise performance excellence, efficiencies, and productivity.
Impact communities and the world by designing the future of healthcare.

“Innovation is vital to our mission of enhancing the health and well-being of every person we serve, today and into the future,” said Candice L. Saunders, president and CEO, Wellstar Health System. “Catalyst by Wellstar positions us to lead change across our system, communities, and the healthcare industry.”

Catalyst by Wellstar convenes and activates best-in-class entrepreneurs, philanthropists, innovation ecosystems, research and development experts, corporate partners, academicians and scientists, and thought leaders inside and outside of the healthcare industry. The center will encompass innovation that drives positive impact related to:

Sustainability
Aging and children
Health equity

“There is endless opportunity to transform healthcare in positive and meaningful ways,” said Dr. Hank Capps, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer, Wellstar Health System. “With Catalyst by Wellstar, our system is poised to purposefully drive innovation faster than the speed of change through thought leadership and collaboration. Our global digital health and innovation center will equip Wellstar to transform the way healthcare is delivered for years to come.”

The first Catalyst by Wellstar partnership is an investment in Atlanta-based Engage, a first-of-its-kind collaborative innovation and corporate venture platform at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Engage brings together industry-leading corporations, enterprise startups, and universities with the shared mission of elevating Atlanta and the Southeast as a leading technology and innovation hub. Wellstar is the only healthcare company to partner with Engage. Saunders has joined Engage’s board of directors and Capps has been named to the Engage Advisory Board.

“As a regional and national healthcare leader, Wellstar brings critical industry perspective to the Engage platform,” said Daley Ervin, managing director of Engage. “Our corporate partners are facing challenges posed by large-scale digital transformation and rapidly evolving customer expectations. Through this partnership, Wellstar will benefit from the expertise of a broad network of industry-leading companies while also leveraging the startup and university research ecosystem on their journey to design the future of healthcare.”

As a result of Wellstar’s investment in Engage, the system will have the opportunity to collaborate with startup technology companies as part of the innovation process, alongside other Engage partners: Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, Delta Air Lines, Georgia-Pacific, the Georgia Power Foundation, Georgia Tech, Goldman Sachs, Home Depot, Inspire Brands, Intercontinental Exchange, Invesco, Invest Georgia, Tech Square Ventures, and UPS. The Engage Fund is managed by Tech Square Ventures. Engage’s exclusive partnership with Georgia Tech, one of the country’s top research and technology commercialization universities, provides unique access to its startup, innovation, and research initiatives.

“Healthcare is one of the strategic areas of focus for UPS and I am thrilled to welcome Wellstar to the Engage partnership,” said Matt Guffey, president of Global Strategy and Transformation at UPS and Engage Advisory Board member.

The second Wellstar Foundation Healthcare Innovation Series virtual roundtable will take place on June 15, 2021 from noon to 1:30 p.m. The event will focus on “Designing the Future of Healthcare,” with emphasis on the role of technology and innovation. The Series convenes community, philanthropic, and thought leaders to facilitate conversation and collaboration to propel the transformation of healthcare. More than 100 participants attended the inaugural event and engaged in discussion about how to enhance health equity. For more information, contact give@wellstar.org.

Georgia Tech hosts Argentina IT delegation

(From left) Mary Waters, deputy commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development; Argentina Consul General Jorge Luis Lopez Menardi; Fernanda Yanson of the Argentina Investment and International Trade Agency, and Juli Golemi, manager of Georgia Tech’s Soft Landings Program. (Photo: Péralte C. Paul)

The Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI²), the Georgia Institute of Technology’s the economic development arm, hosted a delegation of 12 technology companies from Argentina, as part of a multi-city tour to study successful innovation ecosystems.

The 2018 Argentina IT Commercial Mission to Atlanta’s Sept. 18 visit, sponsored by the Consulate General of Argentina and the Argentine American Chamber of Commerce, is designed to give insight into the Atlanta economy and as part of the 12 companies’ longer-term goal of establishing U.S. operations, said Argentina Consul General Jorge Luis Lopez Menardi.

“They’re looking for places to come and explore the possibilities of doing business,” Lopez Menardi said. “We thought the best place for them to come especially regarding an IT mission would be to come to Georgia Tech. The prestige of the university, the talent and the innovation they are promoting from here, we decided the best place to hold the mission would be here.”

While on campus, the group met with Juli Golemi, manager of the Soft Landings Program at EI².

Juli Golemi, Georgia Tech’s Soft Landings Program manager, addresses some of the issues foreign companies wanting to do business in the United States face. (Photo: Péralte C. Paul)

Soft Landings, launched in 2018, is a Georgia Tech offering — through its Economic Development Lab (EDL) — that helps foreign companies that want to establish or increase their business operations in Georgia or better understand the U.S. economy. EDL helps communities and organizations apply innovative ideas to economic development in business incubation and commercialization, strategic planning, and economic sustainability.

Soft Landings, Lopez Menardi said, offers what the visiting companies need as they explore doing business in Atlanta and the United States. The group, which includes companies in financial technology, virtual reality, cybersecurity, and gaming, wants to “get to know the environment, how to do business here, and how companies procure here,” Lopez Menardi said, adding they will use what they learn on this fact-finding trip to better prepare them for possible U.S. expansion and connections with American companies.

“They will want to build top from that and come up again with a specific plan of business to offer different companies,” he said, adding the group, which will visit Tech’s incubator, the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), will also visit Chicago to learn about its innovation ecosystem.

In a panel discussion that included Mary Waters, deputy commissioner of international trade at the Georgia Department of Economic Development; Fernanda Yanson, a foreign trade consultant with the Argentina Investment and International Trade Agency; Lopez Menardi, and Golemi, attendees learned about the different components of Georgia’s successful ecosystem.

Among those components: strong public and private partnerships between state government and industry, a friendly business climate, inter-state agency collaboration, unique assets such as Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and economic diversification, Waters said.

Georgia Department of Economic Development Deputy Commissioner Mary Waters explains why Georgia’s focus on innovation is factors into the state being consistently ranked as one of the best places in which to do business. (Photo: Péralte C. Paul)

“Georgia’s economy is very diverse. We’re strong in agribusiness, we’re strong in aerospace, logistics, medical technologies, ICT, and automotive,” she said.

Underscoring that success model is technology, Waters said, noting the construction boom in Atlanta’s Midtown neighborhood and how Georgia Tech plays a critical role in that innovation-driven growth and expansion.

“Home Depot, Anthem, Delta Air Lines, Mercedes-Benz — they’re all creating innovation certners here in Atlanta and here in Georgia to take advantage of the Georgia Tech talent that we have. Those are companies and expansions that were not on our radar 10 years ago that now underpin the heart and soul of the Atlanta economy and Georgia’s economy,” Waters said.

“Whether you’re talking about automation technology in the manufacturing space or whether you’re talking about tech in agriculture and agribusiness, or innovation in the development of new technologies that will change the world, Georgia is very much in the heart of that and it gets to the heart of what you’re going to hear from Juli and the rest of Georgia Tech and from the private companies you will meet.”

I-Corps South hosts regional summit at Georgia Tech

Keith McGreggor (standing), I-Corps South node co-principal investigator and executive director, greets attendees of the I-Corps South Regional Summit at Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, April 25, 2018. (Photo: Péralte C. Paul)

The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) South node at the Georgia Institute of Technology hosted a regional summit of 12 universities from the South centered on furthering and encouraging greater commercialization of ideas fostered in university labs and classrooms.

The daylong, April 25 summit, which included schools from North and South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia, was designed to allow the different schools to share best practices and lessons learned from ongoing initiatives and plan growth and development strategies.

“When we say innovation, we often only think of certain parts of the country,” Keith McGreggor, the I-Corps South node co-principal investigator and executive director, told the roughly two dozen attendees. “But there’s a lot of innovation and potential occurring here in Georgia and across the South and we want to continue to foster and develop that.”

The I-Corps program, a public-private partnership program established in 2011 by the National Science Foundation (NSF), connects NSF-funded scientific research with the technological, entrepreneurial, and business communities to help create a stronger national ecosystem for innovation that couples scientific discovery with technology development and societal needs.

The I-Corps South node, established in 2016, is a partnership of Georgia Tech, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama in Birmingham, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Haslam College of Business. I-Corps South works and partners with university students and research faculty at schools in 10 states from the South and the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico to teach entrepreneurship, support research and innovation. Through this collaboration, the node has the potential to reach more than 500,000 graduate and undergraduate students, and many thousands of the nation’s research faculty at research universities and historically black colleges and universities across the Southeast and Puerto Rico.

To entrepreneurs, I-Corps South seeks to provide consistent instruction on the principles of evidence-based entrepreneurship in the style of I-Corps. Instruction is direct and challenging, keeping in mind the goal of holding entrepreneurs accountable to know their customers. To universities, the node seeks to provide the tools, support, and resources required to launch and maintain high-quality evidence-based entrepreneurship programs across the southeast.

“I-Corps allows you to grow entrepreneurial ecosystems where the entrepreneurs are, at your schools and communities,” McGreggor said. “What we want to do today is share our ideas and explore opportunities to partner with each other to see how we can work together to further build and develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem of the South.”

Advanced Technology Development Center unveils redesigned space

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, center, cuts the ceremonial ribbon following a redesign of the space at Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center on March 23. From left: House Reps. Doreen Carter and Dar'shun Kendrick; Reed; Chris Downing, interim vice president, Enterprise Innovation Institute; Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research, Georgia Tech; and Jennifer Bonnett, acting general manager, ATDC. — Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, center, cuts the ceremonial ribbon March 23, 2016, following a redesign of the space at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center. From left: Georgia House Reps. Doreen Carter and Dar’shun Kendrick; Reed; Chris Downing, interim vice president, Enterprise Innovation Institute; Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research, Georgia Tech; and Jennifer Bonnett, ATDC’s acting general manager. (PHOTOS by Shane Matthews)

By Péralte C. Paul

Following a year of planning, brainstorming, design reviews, and construction, the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) unveiled its redesigned space March 23 with a ribbon cutting ceremony.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed addresses media and the ATDC community on the incubator's importance in attracting and retaining technology talent in Atlanta and the state. — Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed addresses media and the ATDC community on the incubator’s importance in attracting and retaining technology talent in Atlanta and the state at a March 23, 2016 ribbon cutting ceremony of the incubator’s redesigned space.

ATDC is Georgia Tech’s statewide incubator and works with entrepreneurs in the technology space who want to build successful startups in the Peach State. Launched in 1980, ATDC is one of the longest-running and largest university-based startup incubators in the country. Though headquartered at the Century Building in Midtown Atlanta’s Technology Square, ATDC operates programs across the state, including in Savannah, Augusta, and Athens.

“We had a lot of discussions at ATDC about how best to meet our startups’ needs and make this floor more conducive to the innovation and collaboration atmosphere we have here in the Tech Square community,” said Christopher Downing, interim vice president of Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI²), the Georgia Tech unit that includes its core economic development initiatives, including ATDC.

Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech, describes how ATDC is an important part of the innovation ecosystem not only for Atlanta, but for all of Georgia. — Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech, describes how ATDC is an important part of the innovation ecosystem not only for Atlanta, but for all of Georgia at the incubator’s post-redesign ribbon-cutting ceremony on March 23, 2016.

“The changes you see around you are a result of those discussions and are designed not only to enhance what we do every day, but also to keep to our mission of working with entrepreneurs to help them build and launch successful technology companies right here in Georgia.”

Several members of the Georgia House of Representatives’ Small Business Development Committee, including Reps. Dar’shun Kendrick and Doreen Carter, attended the ceremony, as well as Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who said ATDC is a key part of the city’s efforts to let those in the technology space know that Atlanta is a city of innovation and the place to launch transformative companies.

Jen Bonnett, foreground, right, addresses the Tech Square community March 23, 2016 and details the renovations made to ATDC's floor at the Centergy building in Midtown Atlanta. — Jen Bonnett, foreground, right, addresses the Tech Square community March 23, 2016, and details the renovations made to ATDC’s floor at the Centergy building in Midtown Atlanta.

“I’m here to congratulate you and let you know that you have a partner in the city,” Reed said.

The renovations — which were done through a refinancing of bonds and at no cost to taxpayers — address growing demands for ATDC’S services from its companies and the greater entrepreneurial community. Key highlights include a new lobby, additional seed space and meeting offices, and a new classroom for ATDC classes that also is open and available for free in the evenings to technology entrepreneurs and organizations related to tech startups. Additional changes include a reconfigured library for entrepreneurs’ use as a communal space in which to collaborate and brainstorm.

ATDC startup entrepreneurs and other guests listen as Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech, discusses the incubator's role in being a critical part of the innovation ecosystem at Tech Square. — ATDC startup entrepreneurs and other guests listen as Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech, discusses the incubator’s role in being a critical part of the innovation ecosystem at Tech Square.

“Since its opening in 2003, Tech Square has become the hub of innovation and new ideas in metro Atlanta and in the greater Southeast. With that being the case, there is no more fitting home for ATDC’s home base than right here in Tech Square,” said Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research. “ATDC’s presence here and its ongoing impact for entrepreneurs across the state are critical success factors for the innovation ecosystem as a whole and to Georgia Tech as an institution.”