Despite Easter with all its chocolate and mini breaks, April has been a dynamic month for Sciopolis, marked by exciting developments that we hope to announce in the very near future.

Our commitment to supporting early-stage science and technology ventures continues to drive our efforts and conversations, whether they are about sustainable construction materials or how to build ecosystems around our future sites.

Key Highlights :

1.       Creation of Innovation Hubs

We are accelerating work on a major project in West London which we hope to announce very soon, and started filming around the area, as our previous experience taught us that “video says it better”. If you can see it you can, more easily, believe it. A nascent ecosystem requires some imagination, and capturing the key places and characters from the start – and then following them overtime – is what creates substantiation.

Filming with an old friend - Panji Kaonga from Fabulr Studios

The Origin project in Cambridge with The Crown Estate continues to move forward positively, with the BBC giving labs and farms coverage within the same sentence, for possibly the very first time.

This month we have been appointed to conduct another Feasibility Study on a building in West London which we hope to announce soon.  We discussed this in our most popular blog this year ( Can your building be turned into an Innovation Hub? ) and explained what we look at when ascertaining if a building or an area is suitable to host science and technology ventures. We also talked about how much we enjoy immersing ourselves in these projects and assessing them both from a real estate and ecosystem potential perspective.

2.       Building Strategic partnerships

We have been busy talking to old friends and selecting new partners to join our network of service specialists. These partnerships are crucial to ensure we can offer our members the resources they need, from science support to funding and talent, marketing and legal services.

At the moment we are particularly focused on Sustainable & Cleantech solutions and figuring out how to use them across our sites. We covered this topic in our blog this month, where we launched our Sciopolis Cleantech Commission and invited innovative companies to get in touch with their ideas . We are actively engaging with makers and artisans in the Park Royal Design District to re-use materials, implement solutions and identify opportunities to pilot technologies: our friends at Blast Studio came in to show us their recycled-coffee-cups panels which would look great in a coffee area!

We visited eXmoor Pharma and were very impressed with their setup and ventilation system, as we explore the need for more GMP Manufacturing in the UK. On this point, it’s worth highlighting the interesting GMP Facilities report from Constructing Science this month, which identifies a gap in the market for facilities dedicated to the production of clinical drug trials and personalised medicine.

3.       Community Engagement

We participated in several industry conferences and explored other Innovation Hubs to learn form their experience. Among our many discoveries, we discussed the importance of both pubs (Park Royal) & pharmacies (Dubai)  in the creation of a good ecosystem. This may be helpful for you to know as you emerge from the Bank Holiday: you were not at the pub, you were busy building an ecosystem!

As we move into May, our focus remains on expanding our network, building strategic partnerships and supporting our community of innovators. Stay tuned for more updates and join us on this journey of growth and innovation!