Peachtree Corners, Georgia

PEACHTREE CORNERS , GEORGI A initiate the economic development project that has become Curiosity Lab. “As a city, we are experts in infrastructure; we have to own, operate, and maintain roads, water, sewer, drainage, etc. So, we thought, ‘Why not use a small section of our infrastructure and enhance it to create what we call “a sandbox” for people to come experiment in?’ We ultimately decided, ‘let’s take a mile and a half section of road inside Tech Park Atlanta, among all these existing companies, and add a bunch of devices, systems and networks. Let’s add a test track and a lot of technology infrastructure and tie it together in one location to create a living laboratory for true technology innovators.’” BVM: Can you give us some details on the concept and operations? Plattenburg: “Curiosity Lab is an economic development initiative of Peachtree Corners and 100-percent owned and operated by the city. Because we own the roads, the sidewalks, and the right-of-way, there is one decision maker in terms of who can test, which allows us to be very prompt if someone is interested in testing, and very flexible about what they can test. For instance, if somebody wanted to test something that needed to be embedded in the road, or needed to be standing next to the road, or needed to run on a sidewalk, or even in the air – we can test drones under 400 feet – they don’t need to go to multiple government entities to make that request. They only need to come to one place. “We’re finding that’s of great interest to small and large companies, alike. Because anytime you get on a public roadway, there are multiple jurisdictions and it can be a very lengthy approval process; if you get approved at all. Also, because the track sits in an existing technology park, the thousands of people who live there and work there will be interacting with the track all the time as they go about their business. Because most test tracks are behind closed doors in very controlled environments, this one will be unpredictable and that’s quite appealing to people who want to test.”