In February, AT&T (NYSE: T) will open a center at the Texas Medical Center's TMCx campus that is one of only six in the world.
The AT&T Foundry for Connected Health center at TMCx will focus on health care technology. It will feature at-home and clinical care mockups for companies, physicians or other people with ideas on health care innovation to develop and test products. The goal is to get a prototype of a product done in around six months, and then the company developing the technology would move forward with production and regulatory hurdles, Craig Lee, director of AT&T Foundry's Internet of Things program, told the HBJ.
"By having that as a resource, we should be able to partner with companies in the space and help them achieve their goals and getting things connected with the vast resources we have," Lee said.
Other Foundry centers in Palo Alto, California; Plano, Texas, where it has two; Atlanta; and Israel focus on business, mobile and home tech such as new wheelchairs, connected homes and security systems, and hands-free tech for the car, according to the Foundry's website.
The Foundry innovation centers are part of a $100 million investment in new tech from Dallas-based AT&T, as well as Ericsson Inc., Alcatel-Lucent SA, Amdocs Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., according to a statement.
AT&T does not take equity from a participating company or a technology as it enters the Foundry. Instead, after being vetted by AT&T, a company comes in, is helped along by the telecommunications behemoth, and if the new technology becomes successful, AT&T tries to bring it into its business development or customer portfolio, Lee added.
The Foundry center is the latest installment in a series of steps the Texas Medical Center has taken over the past two years to develop a nexus for health care and biotech innovation in Houston, what it calls its Innovation Institute. TMC opened TMCx, a 100,000-square-foot co-working space and accelerator in October 2014. Since then, the TMC has further developed a business accelerator for health care companies, opened a co-working space for more advanced health tech companies, and has been courting big names like Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and now AT&T to participate in the Innovation Institute.
