James May June 2024 web - Flipbook - Page 10
those and the only organizations that
can own, maintain, regulate, and operate public spaces are public organizations such as cities.”
No charge for research & testing
“It occurred to us,” Johnson said,
“to turn our public streets into a
living lab available for the testing and
demonstration of innovative technologies free of charge. We don’t charge
to use the facility because money
is a barrier to entry, especially for
early-stage start-ups. But if you get
someone to show up, even if they are
here for just one day, we know they
will get hungry and eat in our restaurants or they may need to be here for
a couple of days and they will stay
in our hotels. So we knew we could
indirectly get some money from sales
taxes or lodging taxes. Furthermore,
we decided not to require intellectual
property ownership of anything created or invented, because we knew the
universities would play if they didn’t
have to give up their IP.”
After asking all those questions,
figuring out answers on how to make
the tech park unique and thus creating
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a magnet to attract companies, Johnson and his team presented a proposal
to the Mayor and Council to establish
the lab within the technology park.
At the time, Mayor Mike Mason—
who has served since 2012 and chairs
the lab’s board— believed that “if we
build it, they will come.” He likens
the testing to “the walk phase of
crawl- walk- run. You crawl in a closed
testing environment, you walk in a
suburban testing environment such
as Curiosity Lab, and then if your
product can pass its tests here, you
can run in an urban environment like
downtown Atlanta.”
“We can’t control the free market,
but we can control the supporting
structure to make it a good opportunity and we can make sure that our regulations have been reduced to the bare
minimum so there’s no bureaucratic
headache. We can stay in our lane to
operate public infrastructure and do it
well, and we’ll be supportive of everything from early-stage start-ups and
Fortune 500 companies to academic
researchers,” Mason says.
The Innovation Center is the ecosystem HQ of Curiosity Lab. Located
