Vivint outgrows its Innovation Center

LEHI, Utah—One year after opening a 30,000-square-foot Innovation Center here, Vivint has outgrown its current facility and is now planning to move the center to a new building nearby that's about three times the size of the existing center.

Vivint announced the opening of its new Innovation Center in early 2013.

However, said David Bywater, Vivint COO, “We outgrew it, so we're just … getting much more space.” He said the new 100,000-square-foot center being built at Thanksgiving Point should be ready for occupancy this summer and will allow Vivint to double the size of the center's staff.

Shortly after it opened last year, the staff consisted of about 50 hardware, software and radio engineers, industrial designers and user-experience professionals.

The fact that Vivint, a leading home automation/home security provider based in Provo, Utah, is expanding its Innovation Center shows how important innovation is to the company, Bywater said.

“We're very committed to it,” he told Security Systems News. “Innovation is core to our business. We understand that if we don't out innovate, we'll die. We view innovation as our life blood and take it very seriously.”

He said that at the center, “we're trying to deliver on known needs, perceived needs or unperceived needs, but [they're all] real needs of our customers. It's a phenomenal place. You walk through there and it is just real electric energy, creating solutions for customer needs.”

He said that at the center, staff work on “new products that are core to our platform, [ones] that are tangential to our platform, as well as new business offerings.”

Vivint, which was bought by The Blackstone Group in 2012 for more than $2 billion, has been growing its infrastructure since then along with its business.

For example, last summer, it doubled the size of its home Provo campus with a 100,000-square-foot new building there, bringing its total square footage in Utah to 395,000 square feet.

The Lehi location is about halfway between Provo and Salt Lake City. That site for the Innovation Center “allows us to draw technical talent from both Utah County—Provo is in Utah county—and Salt Lake County,” Bywater said.