Story ID: 
Bombardier Opens Montreal Innovation and Design Center
By: Sarah Rose
Caption: New facility accelerates cabin design and testing
Word Count: 327
Bombardier today opened its new innovation and design center in Montreal, a strategic facility focused on advancing the cabin experience for business aviation customers. The space will enable rapid development and testing of design innovations independent of aircraft program timelines.
“This is a dedicated space that allows us to focus on customer-centric innovations that will allow us to move rapidly, fail fast, iterate, and bring true, exceptional innovations to our key customers faster than we’ve ever done before,” Bombardier v-p of aircraft innovation Sean Johnson told AIN. Johnson added that he hopes the facility will build upon the industry’s renewed focus on design and completions work.
“This center really allows us to do this off the critical path of a major aircraft program where we can innovate on features and experiences rapidly and then deploy them to all our existing fleets—not just wait for a new, clean-sheet airplane,” he said. “There’s no doubt that, especially in business aircraft, if you want to get it right, the best thing you can do is design around the cabin at the same time you’re developing the aircraft.”
The center will house full-scale mockups and prototypes, allowing Bombardier teams to experiment, iterate, and validate concepts. Located near Bombardier’s manufacturing facilities in the Montreal area, the center aims to allow seamless collaboration between industrial designers, engineers, and upholsterers. These resources are intended to bring forward technologies more quickly while maintaining product reliability and integration ease.
“I think the decision of the location of the space was to be close to the resources and the cross-functional resources that we intend to employ. And of course, with the critical mass that we have here in Montreal, it just made the most sense for us to keep it close to all of those resources that we would draw upon when we’re doing our new designs,” Johnson said.