Inventing by Ear: How Listening Sparks Innovation at Parker
How do you foster innovation? Enable breakthroughs? Meet the needs of tomorrow? At Parker, innovation starts with a deep understanding of customer needs. And that quest for knowledge is at the heart of the Parker Filtration Innovation Center, an 82,000 square foot R&D space near Nashville, Tennessee.
Parker has five of these innovation centers focused on advanced manufacturing, robotics and additive manufacturing. Each is a center of excellence where Parker engineers explore new applications for emerging technologies, collaborate across business unites or functions and create solutions for a more sustainable world.
“When I wake up in the morning, I have no idea what kind of fires we’re going to put out,” explains laboratory manager Tyrone Wells, Ph.D. “Customers bring us their problems. We listen. And we get to use science to solve those problems, which is deeply satisfying.”
At the Filtration Innovation Center, a team of the brightest thinkers from all over Parker— engineers, scientists, military veterans and industry experts— come together in a veritable innovation proving ground to conduct research, share knowledge and develop emerging products and systems.
“We develop new filtration technologies. We partner in new ways. We rethink competitive products that aren’t meeting our customers’ needs,” adds Dean Pighin, global engineering manager. “We solve the problems of today by developing the tools and technologies of tomorrow.”
That’s the idea behind market-driven innovation—having the flexibility and the infrastructure to meet customers where they are.
“We’re an innovation center so we have to be flexible,” says Wells. “We have to be able to reconfigure to accommodate our customers. So we start with this incredible equipment in our laboratory and then we develop new technologies, new testing methods and leverage those to build more reliable solutions. Better tools, more solutions, more prototypes, it’s a great feedback loop!”
What kind of solutions are Wells and his team working on? Whether the challenge is improving filter life, optimizing fuel cells, reducing greenhouse gas emissions or harnessing the power of hydrogen combustion, the team is creating technology platforms for a wide variety of applications. But that’s not the only future-focused thinking happening at the Parker Filtration Innovation Center.
“We decided early on it was important to give back to our community, to make a positive impact beyond the walls of our building,” explains Wells. “We’ve partnered with our local school system to offer a robotics program and an engineering design course. We funded an Innovation Center complete with an engineering lab and a chemistry lab. And we’ve embarked on a multifaceted project to design our own disc golf course where kids can learn how to survey the land and design better discs while developing their STEM skills.”
If innovation is the heart of Parker, these centers are the lifeblood of innovation.
“The work that happens here enables breakthroughs,” summarizes Pighin. “It supports our mission to be a transformative force in accelerating Parker’s role in energy, environmental and life sciences, and it has an impact—on the community and future generations of innovators.”
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