Daimler plans latest innovation center in Atlanta's Buckhead

ATLANTA -- Daimler said it will put its fourth global innovation center in Buckhead -- Atlanta's emerging tech industry corridor.

Lab 1886 will be located at Terminus 100, a 27-story office tower about 8 miles from Mercedes-Benz USA's $93 million headquarters campus.

Daimler will locate the Atlanta innovation center inside a roughly 50,000-square-foot WeWork office at Terminus 100. The Daimler office is expected to accommodate about 25 people, a source told Automotive News. Daimler plans to launch the center next month.

Lab1886, a reference to the year Daimler's founders invented the first automobile, combines a big corporation's know-how with the spirit of a startup. It also has a venture capital component to invest in new ideas.

The innovation center will allow the Mercedes-Benz parent to tap into the entrepreneurial instincts of its employees, who are encouraged to come up with new ideas that are generally not related to car design. Eventually, the ideas are voted on, and those that are approved go to innovation labs, which can then be brought to market.

"Our industry is changing faster than ever," Axel Harries, vice president of product management and sales for Mercedes-Benz said earlier this year. "We are turning back into a startup, which is exactly what we were when we came up with the novel idea of the automobile."

The location makes sense: Buckhead, in recent years, has attracted numerous tech startups and Fortune 500 firms, including Salesforce and Amazon. The area's tech industry is anchored by Atlanta Tech Village, a 100,000-square-foot hive of early stage companies.

The Atlanta hub, will be one of four in the world and focus on commercializing new technologies and developing mobile applications and processes. Two of the other labs are in Germany -- Stuttgart and Berlin -- with the third in Beijing.