[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Ford announced plans to create and open its first dedicated research lab in Silicon Valley early this year. Ford Research and Innovation, the company’s advanced engineering arm, will open the new Silicon Valley lab in the first quarter.

Paul Mascarenas (Chief technical officer, vice president, Research, Ford):  Ford has an incredible heritage of driving innovation in the transportation and manufacturing sectors during the past 107 years. Now it’s time to prepare for the next 100 years.

The new Ford lab will be located in the San Francisco Bay area of California and will serve as a hub for independent technology projects and identification of new research investments and partners located along the west coast. Ultimately, the lab will create an “innovation network” connecting Ford’s Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, California, and Ford employees working with connectivity platform partner Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

The new research lab’s employees will be recruited both locally and rotated-in from the global network of Ford employees and will spend their time developing and discovering new technologies, trends, partners and collaborative research projects. The number of Ford employees at its new lab will be comparable to what you expect of a startup, with an emphasis on quality over quantity, said K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for open innovation with Ford Research and Innovation.

Ford’s global Research and Innovation team is already working in several key areas that will be supported by the work of the Silicon Valley lab, says Ford, including personal mobility, and Open-source hardware and software developer kits, among other things.