Air Liquide Group (Paris, France; www.airliquide.com) has announced three investments in France, supporting various innovation initiatives. The investments total nearly €100 million.
First Air Liquide will extend and modernize its Paris-Saclay research center, near Versailles, which is its main Research & Development center in the world. A single building will house the 350 current researchers and the 46 laboratories and will have pilot platforms with equipment for designing and testing technologies in industrial-scale conditions. It will allow Air Liquide to reinforce its "open innovation" strategy through academic and industrial research partnerships with players from the Paris-Saclay innovation ecosystem. Air Liquide thereby reinforces its presence in this ecosystem, which now includes 10,500 researchers and 48,000 students, and which by 2020 will be one the 10 biggest innovation hubs in the world.
Moreover, Air Liquide will also create a center for the development of gas packaging for Industry and Health on its Paris-Saclay site. Its mission will be to develop and industrialize new gas packagings for Industry and Health, while ensuring optimum safety, simplicity of use, traceability, and including digital technologies and new materials, allowing Air Liquide to launch new offers with a faster time-to-market.
And finally, Air Liquide will create a technical center of excellence for cryogenic production technologies in Vitry-sur-Seine, near Paris. Within the Engineering & Construction unit, this center will be responsible for developing and industrializing innovative and high added-value technologies for the production of oxygen, as well as bringing together expertise in this field, while ensuring training, the protection of know-how, and the transfer of innovation within the global engineering network.