MOHAIs new Bezos Center for Innovation looks forward by glancing in the rearview mirror.

When SEATTLEs Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) announced two years ago that Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos was donating $10 million to create the Bezos Center for Innovation at its new home in Lake Union Park, you could appreciate the novelty.

It was the largest gift MOHAI had ever received.

It was Bezoss most visible donation to a Seattle cultural institution.

It was a partnership that merged historical Seattle with contemporary Seattle.

The Center for Innovation officially opens October 12, featuring 4,000 square feet smack dab in the middle of MOHAIs main gallery. MOHAI Executive Director Leonard Garfield sees it as a history museum helping to shape the future.

Garfield says the center explores the remarkable history of innovation in the Puget Sound region and poses the question: What is it about Seattle? Why this place? Exhibits and programs will seek to answer exactly what makes a certain location become a hotbed of innovation and how that can be passed on to carry the tradition forward, Garfield notes.

Among the centers offerings will be a community grand challenge that will ask patrons to identify areas where innovation would make a difference. Garfield says MOHAI will invest in the best and leverage them toward development.

When MOHAI announced the gift in 2011, Bezos said: Look at the disproportionate number of extraordinary organizations founded in Seattle. Microsoft, Costco, Boeing, Fred Hutch, PACCAR, even UPS was founded here. … Theres something about Seattle that has made it an unusually good place to innovate, and the center will help Seattle continue on that course by showcasing and teaching how industrial innovation can play an important role in human advancement.

Bezos modestly refrained from mentioning his own creation, Amazon, which revolutionized publishing and retailing, and now boasts more than 90,000 employees. Regardless, his point is apt and his interest in helping MOHAI look forwardand challenge Seattle to do the samecelebrates the best of the innovative spirit: appreciating what went before in order to blaze a new trail forward.