Daresbury Reaches Enterprise Milestone

Daresbury Science & Innovation Campus has reached a new milestone in its drive to become a world-class hub of technology and research-driven commerce by attracting its 60th tenant, many of whom are interacting with each other.

All are currently located within the impressive state-of-the-art Daresbury Innovation Centre, one of two new buildings developed by the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) as part of its ten-year £50 million investment in the campus site. The Cockcroft Institute, the UK National Centre of Excellence in accelerator science, occupies the other building.

Backed by a number of business support services, the centre has been highly successful in attracting digital/ICT, electronics, healthcare, instrumentation, and advanced engineering companies - the feedstock of the knowledge economy.

"What we are seeing is the development of mini clusters in different market sectors and companies seeing opportunities to interact with each other," reports John Leake, General Manager of the site business development company. Many tenants are in fruitful commercial or research-based collaboration, activity often triggered through informal contact at networking events.

It was at one such meeting that Mike Carter and Chris Haslam, co-directors of Ixis, an IT consultancy and web development company, met up with Manoj Ranaweera who runs Ebdex, an electronic invoicing enterprise, and agreed to form a third company, Edocr. The joint venture has developed technology to make it easier for companies to place documents online so they become more available to the general public. "Daresbury is a great place for bouncing ideas off people, a very fertile environment in which to create new products and even new companies," comments Carter.

Most of the 60 tenants located on the campus are financed through their own trading or through regional venture capital funds. They are supported by the rapidly growing Daresbury Network and access2experts programme, which brings together a powerful community of high-tech SMEs, multi-national companies, universities and service providers.

With the space filling up plans are being developed for another business centre building 50% larger, at 36,000 sq ft, than the existing Innovation Centre. It will have small-scale lab and work unit space and will cater for companies who have outgrown the original building and new arrivals.

The government has designated Daresbury as one of two strategically important national science campuses where it will partner business, universities and research institutes in a drive to sharpen the UK's global competitiveness.

It is run by a joint venture partners include the NWDA, the Science & Technology Facilities Council, Halton Borough Council and the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster and currently houses 1,000 research scientists, business people, technicians, engineers and support staff. Daresbury is seeking to replicate the success it had in attracting the Cockcroft Institute by winning the investment for several of the new Research Institutes, which the government recently, in principle, allocated to the site.