Capital alone doesn’t scale Innovation: infrastructure does

October brought fresh insights into the UK’s innovation landscape, with the Beauhurst x Parkwalk Advisors Spinout Report 2025 highlighting strong investor confidence in university-led innovation. We are delighted, if somewhat unsurprised, to see the investment market improving.

However, capital alone doesn’t scale innovation. Without the right infrastructure, spinouts risk burning through funding on workspace fit-outs in disconnected locations, slowing progress instead of accelerating it.

At Sciopolis, we’re working to create that infrastructure every day.

Here’s how we did it this month:

• We deepened Lab supplier relationships at the Lab Innovations event in Birmingham, seeking collaborators, not just vendors, who understand that value goes beyond equipment.. Read more here

• We explored the future of labs at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s #MoreChemLabs workshop, asking what minimum viable labs look like, and who’s ready to build them.

  
  

• We joined the Innovate Cambridge Summit, where the message was: ideas need capital, but ecosystems need infrastructure. Cambridge is the second most invested innovation hotspot in the world and we need to spread its power to other clusters – like Manchester for example, which we visited this week

• We stood on the balcony at Old Oak Common, witnessing the scale of HS2 and its potential to supercharge connectivity for our future tenants at #OnePortalWay. We believe you don’t have to build everything everywhere: it’s smarter to connect the dots.

  
  

  

• We shared our reuse-first approach in our Sensibly Sustainable blog, showing how hyperlocal circularity can be embedded into innovation spaces: simple in theory, harder in practice

  
  

• We celebrated community-led placemaking at North Acton Square where artists and makers are already thriving, and scientists will soon join them at #OnePortalWay.

• We advanced the AI conversation, from Italian Tech Week to the Ealing AI Conference, exploring what AI infrastructure our tenants will need, which sectors are emerging (is robotics about to have its “ChatGPT moment” ?) and how we should respond - with excitement, caution.. or both?

• One Portal Way: as we progress our new innovation hub in North Acton, we’re spending equal time on construction (things going well. Opening in June 2026!) and on building the network and service infrastructure for our tenants that can make a material difference to their scaling.

• Fancy popping in? If you ever fancy a tour or a nose around, we’re onsite every Tuesday, just get in touch. We have had fantastic feedback to our tours: once you see the scale of what is being built in the area and the innovation potential, the penny really drops. We look forward to seeing you there!