Groundbreakings always are about looking forward. There is a timeline regarding when the work will be completed. And there are metrics on the jobs — and revenue — that is expected to come with the project.
The groundbreaking Thursday afternoon in New Brunswick for HELIX 2, the 370,000-square-foot state-of-the-art building by SJP Properties that will serve as the global headquarters for the world-famous Nokia Bell Labs when it opens in 2028 had all of that.
The groundbreaking, however, represents so much more.
The research that will be done when HELIX 2 — in quantum technologies and other areas — is expected to change the world. That’s the DNA of Bell Labs.
So said Thierry Klein, the president of Bell Labs Solutions Research.
Speaking to a Who’s Who crowd of business leaders and elected officials — including Gov. Phil Murphy — Klein tried to level set the moment.
Greatness is the goal, he said.
“Some might say, ‘Oh, it’s just a move of a building,’” he said. “But this is much more than just moving into a building. This is really us recommitting to innovation and recommitting to innovation in New Jersey.”
Klein and Peter Vetter, the president of Bell Labs core research and thus the co-leader of the organization, reminded the crowd that this is not the first move in the company’s now 100-year history.
In 1941, the company moved from New York City to its current Murray Hill location. What followed was what many consider not only the greatest decade of the labs, but the arguably greatest decade of innovation and invention in human history as Bell Labs invented the transistor, cellular concept and information theory.
Klein and Vetter said the new building — and the spark of innovation that came from it — was responsible for a moment in time that Bill Gates once said he would choose as his destination if time travel was possible.
“I want to think that our move will again be a catalyst for big innovations to happen in the decade after this move,” Vetter said.
Klein said the challenge for current researchers and scientists to create a time period that future time travelers will want to visit — whether it’s 2028, 2038, 2048 — because that was when life-changing inventions were discovered.
Such back-to-the-future moments are what DEVCO President Chris Paladino hoped the HELIX would bring to a state that historically has been a global leader in innovation. He admits, however, that having Nokia Bell Labs leading the effort was beyond even his wildest dreams.
“To be honest, I could not have imagined that when we started the HELIX project that this is where we would be today,” he said.
He then quickly did more of the math that comes with groundbreakings.
“This will be 1,000 mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists and electrical engineers coming to New Brunswick,” he said.
The best part, Paladino said, is that the next generation of Jerseyans will be behind some of these next-generation discoveries.
“Five hundred of those mathematicians and scientists are going to be young people who are graduating from Rutgers and Princeton and Stevens and NJIT,” he said. “The fact that we have someone like Nokia being eager to collaborate with the academic research that will be going on here is incredible.”
It could very well lead to the next discovery that puts New Jersey on the global map of innovation. It could bring Nokia Bell Labs its 11th Noble Prize or sixth Turing Award.
Klein certainly would be happy to see Bell Labs again so honored. But he said he’d be more delighted for what that would mean for the world.
“The point is not the awards,” he said. “The point is that you get these awards if you do groundbreaking research, and you do research that has an impact on the world.”
Nokia Bell Labs took the first step toward that Thursday afternoon.
Read more from BINJE:
- SJP begins construction of Nokia Bell Labs HQ at the HELIX
- Rendering of H3 shows size, scope of HELIX innovation district
- JLL to begin marketing plug-and-play lab suites at HELIX
