Black and Decker To Open Innovation Lab At Innovation And Design Building

Another Connecticut-based Fortune 500 company is showing interest in Boston.

Stanley Black and Decker will open an innovation lab in the Seaport’s Innovation and Design Building, sources close to the transaction told Bisnow. 

While this will not be a relocation of the company’s New Britain, Conn., headquarters, it will be its first R&D presence in Boston proper. Black and Decker did not return calls for comment. Jamestown, the owner of the IDB, also did not return our calls.

The company has job listings in Boston for two software development innovation leaders responsible for “evaluating new technologies, designing system architectures as well as working on proofs of concept, modeling development approaches and designing and executing pilots in which minimum viable products will be evaluated in the market.” The listing names Nike, LG and Samsung as peer consumer durable innovators.

Brokers familiar with the IDB say several companies have expressed interest in opening innovation labs or makerspaces in the building.

Black and Decker last opened a 5k SF innovation lab in Atlanta’s Atlantic Station in 2015. The company’s Boston innovation center will join others in the area operated by GE, Fidelity, John Hancock and Liberty Mutual. Autodesk’s BUILD (building, innovation, learning and design) space will be particularly close, as the software company is also an IDB tenant.

Jamestown president Michael Phillips told the audience at Bisnow’s State of the Seaport event last week that the success of his building was owed to careful tenant curating and that the company had turned down several big tenants in favor of more “interesting” ones that would be additive to the IDB culture of collaborative innovation.