The new 86,000-square-foot Alliant Energy Agriculture Innovation Lab at the Iowa State University Research Park opened last week, creating a hub for “service-driven innovation,” said Matt Darr, the leader of the university’s Digital Agriculture Innovation Team, which calls the new building home.

The building is located on University Boulevard on the southern edge of the Research Park on the south edge of Ames. It quadruples the space Darr’s team has to work with customers, do research and develop projects, a sizable increase from the space the team previously occupied at the university’s research farm along U.S. Highway 30 west of Ames.

“This facility provides us the space that is proportional to our ambition for how we want to serve in the future,” Darr said. “It gives us the training space to bring in the types of groups and provide them hands-on experiences that are unique and differentiated. It gives us the type of access to labs and shop space to help support Iowa companies the way we aspire to and intend to.”

He said while the Digital Ag Team, made up of 60 faculty, staff and graduate students, was already doing those things, “this is going to increase our capability and efficiency of doing that.”

“From an office space perspective, it’s the type of space that validates who we are as an organization, helps us to recruit staff and graduate students who want to work in this space and start to grow their careers,” Darr said. “It’s been a project we have needed for a long time for the growth of our program and the growth of the impact. Everything we do is supported through our engagement and partnerships, education, innovation and outreach, and without the good work this team does, none of this exists.”

Darr’s team is responsible for about 50% of the industry research done at the university. It holds more than 90 patents and technical transfer licenses. It has also developed more than 60 products used in agriculture today, including a yield map on a sugar cane harvester, tools that  measure moisture content in grain and various agriculture software programs.

The cost of the building was about $15.5 million, with Alliant Energy contributing $3 million from a strategic projects budget funded by shareholders. The balance came from the Research Park, including land.

Darr said his team works on between 30 and 40 projects a year, with partners ranging in size from single-person startups to companies of all sizes.

“Our target customer is more about can we provide value,” he said. “We’re hopeful and we anticipate that every one of those relationships is somebody that’s coming to us because they have a problem and they’re looking for thought leadership.”

The goal with the new building is not to increase the number of partners or companies served, Darr said.

“We rarely do things that are simply asked of us,” he said. “We’re always given the opportunity to lean in and provide thought leadership to direct innovation. That number is not going to grow next year. Our ambition of moving into this space was not to double from 30 partnerships a year to 60 partnerships a year. It was about right-sizing to the existing partnerships and making sure our doors are open so that when that startup comes in, when that small company comes in or that big [original equipment manufacturer] comes in and says we have a problem, that we’re able to contribute to that.”

He said the partnerships with Alliant Energy and the Research Park were critical in making the building become a reality.

Alliant’s connections to rural areas of the state and its common goals with Darr and his team made the energy company a perfect fit to partner with on the building, he said.

“We have such a common view of our goals and our purpose, and how that creates a positive impact on Iowa, particularly rural Iowa, it’s made the partnership pretty successful,” Darr said. “We both believed that by partnering together we could do more.”

Darr said locating in the Research Park made sense given its proximity to the university and amenities the community offers.

“We certainly could have expanded [at the BioCentury Research Farm] but there were several key points of value to getting here,” he said. “First, it’s on a bus route so in terms of student access and connectivity, this brings us closer to that. We can get students here for classes, for hands-on experiences. It’s closer to a lot of the partners we work with.”

Then there’s the benefit of being connected to city services and other amenities, he said.

“This was not an easy decision,” Darr said. “We do a lot of work with big, heavy machinery and you’re bringing that closer to town, so there’s some trade-offs that go with it. But we felt the impact that we were trying to create on behalf of the College of Ag and Life Sciences, on behalf of Iowa State University, the bigger presence, the connectivity with students and our partners, it just made sense to really explore this move and certainly the Research Park was supportive of that and helped make it all happen.”

Darr said that while people may look at the bright, shiny new building his team now calls home, the mission is for their partners.

“We have this big building and we worked our tails off to get to this point, but it’s all about Iowa,” he said. “It’s how can we continue to help companies be successful. I fundamentally believe that by helping with innovation, helping connect talent in this space and helping farmers better understand how that innovation works on the farm, that we contribute to help make Iowa more successful and that’s why we come into work every day.”