Steve Rogerson visits Analog Devices’ co-creation space in Ireland.

My travels this week took me to Limerick in Ireland where American semiconductor company Analog Devices (ADI) has a huge campus and an accelerator design centre called Catalyst that opened in March last year. The goal behind Catalyst was to enable co-creation, so ADI could invite its customers into the 9200m² laboratory and work with them to design products.

Co-creation is not a new idea but is becoming more popular as changes in technology are happening so rapidly companies find it difficult to do everything themselves. Working directly with others reduces some of this burden.

So far ADI has filled about a third of the area and is confident of the rest being used within the next year. Early interest has come from industrial, automotive and smart building developers and the driving force is about moving intelligence from the cloud to the edge.

“Intelligence, to be successful, needs deep cooperation from all parties,” said Shalini Palmer, corporate vice president at ADI.

Part of the deal is the companies who take part in the co-creation have to demonstrate a commitment to the process,

“We don’t ask for a payment,” said Mike Morrissey, Catalyst director, “because it is co-creation, but we do want a commitment in terms of technology and people.”

Medical giant Johnson & Johnson is a good example. It has put its own robots into the Catalyst as well as stationing some of its people at the accelerator as it looks to streamline the development and production of its medical products.

“We are seeing diminishing talent,” said John O’Donnell from J&J. “We have lines at a standstill because we don’t have the people to operate them. This is driving the need for autonomy in manufacturing.”

Another company working at the centre is Vodafone as it looks to influence the development of the Open RAN (radio access network) standard that allows interoperability between mobile providers.

“Working with the customer gives us a lot more knowledge of the end problem,” said Leo McHugh, ADI’s vice president of industrial automation, “and that is giving us a lot more information for our future development. What minimises the risk for us is when customers put their engagement and people here and we work with their engineers.”

One problem in industrial is there are many existing factories that cannot be knocked down and rebuilt. This means industrial automation technology often has to work alongside existing equipment and, importantly, people.

“There are more autonomous robots roaming around factories,” said Leo, “but we have to make it safe because they are working side by side with people.”

However, he said another problem was data that were not being used.

“Intelligent edge is changing that,” he said. “It is no good knowing there was a problem on the production line two days ago. You want to make adjustments in real time. That is where intelligent edge comes in.”

One of the themes of the day was energy saving, in factories, in mobile networks and, of course, in buildings, which account for about a fifth of all the energy we consume. That is why so much emphasis is being placed on making buildings more energy efficient.

“When governments look at hitting climate goals, they see buildings as low hanging fruit,” said Olive Murphy, ADI’s director of intelligent building applications.

And as with factories, it is not on to knock down all the old buildings and replace them with new energy-efficient homes and offices. Many will have ageing HVAC systems that won’t talk with modern smart home equipment. Alexa will be totally stumped. Yet property companies are keen to get round this as they can demand higher rents and prices for buildings that are smart.

ADI is working with a company on solving this, but Olive said she was not allowed to say who, though again intelligence at the edge was key as was security.

“We have to make sure someone can’t disconnect your thermostat and replace it with something more sinister,” she said.

Though a lot of companies talk about working with others to achieve gains in technology, it was nice to see this working in practice with a dedicated space for such co-creation to take place. Already, ADI (www.analog.com) is seeing fruits from the seeds it planted when it constructed this building. And it looks on track for that to extend in the future to not just Ireland but around the world. It is now thinking of establishing a catalyst in Japan and other countries are likely to follow. This is co-creation in action.