How Nexus at Leeds University is turning knowledge into business
Since it was founded in 2019, the Nexus facility at the University of Leeds has become a vital piece of West Yorkshire’s innovation furniture bridging the gap between business and academia.
Director Gareth Scargill is very happy for its place to remain on the periphery of the university’s estate.
He says: “On the front of this building it doesn’t say University of Leeds and that’s deliberate. It isn’t ‘come to this event at the university’. it’s ‘come to Nexus’. If this was in the middle of the campus or at the top end it wouldn’t be a success. It has a prominent position here.”
All universities are currently assessing their estate requirements as the higher education system finds itself in difficult budgetary times. Leeds University isn’t blessed with vast acres to develop on, so it has been innovative.
Nexus offers smaller space occupiers terms of one-month notice. Lab users, who tend to link the length of their tenure to the length of their funding, are on three-month terms. It doesn’t do traditional property leases, preferring a license-like flexible arrangement on rates and prices because it isn’t looking at what rent they can generate, but what value they can bring.
Larger businesses are among current occupiers though and they include transport software business Tracsis and logistics experts Ligentia.
So how does Scargill see future innovation space being provided for across our cities? “I think it will come through devolution, local settlements. Perhaps it won’t be fully funded, but match funded to a certain extent. The private market is looking for a return unless they see it being part of a bigger picture because the yields aren’t as strong because we don’t those traditional ten-year leases.
“I think universities will continue to invest in spaces like this for two reasons: they want to link industry to academics and they also want to make themselves more attractive to domestic and international students to not only come and get a degree but also potentially get work experience. We have students here who have been supported to build their own businesses while studying.”
The emerging anchor of the investment zone is the University of Huddersfield and its National Health Innovation Campus at Southgate. Its aim is to improve health outcomes for the UK and North of England.
The seven-acre site will offer 75,000m² of space across seven buildings. The first, the Daphne Steel Building, is complete and open with a variety of labs with uses including physiotherapy, podiatry and occupational therapy.
The second facility, the Emily Siddon Building, is expected to open in December with specialist clinical teaching facilities, a community diagnostic centre, and a health and wellbeing innovation centre on the top floor.
Sue Cooke is chief executive of the 3M Buckley Innovation Centre, an affiliation of the University of Huddersfield. She says the 5,500sq ft Emily Siddon innovation centre will be modelled on the successful 3M with offices, labs, co-working space, a maker space and what is promised to be Huddersfield’s best conference room too. It will link into the nearby Glassbox centre, run by Kirklees Council.
Cooke says: “We will have a membership approach so people might not need an office or lab, maybe they work from home but we can get them involved in the workshops, the mentoring because the NHS trusts are really close partners in this and we've got good links now into the clinicians and the innovation teams.
“We are one of, if not the strongest in the region for nursing, midwifery, podiatry, paramedics, all those allied health professions apart from medicine because we don't have a medical school per se. We're very highly ranked in world university terms for nursing.”
West Yorkshire Combined Authority has commissioned a study from real estate consultancy CBRE for health innovation in the region.
Cooke says: “There's different niches but Huddersfield is very much the next shining beacon of the cluster. We've got exciting businesses in the health space around Huddersfield like Paxmans and Thornton & Ross and lots of other smaller ones and new entrepreneurs that people won’t have heard of yet.”
The 3MBIC itself has had success providing space for growing local companies too. Software business Adventoris and industrial ceramics innovators Ionix which span out to a new facility in Leeds.
Cooke says: “They all start off with something small, they might have their ups and downs but hopefully they'll grow and get to the point then when they need their own space. It's like a teenager moving out!”
Established developer Scarborough Group International (SGI) is currently working up its plans to convert the Old Medical School on the University of Leeds site. It marks the first phase of the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) Innovation Village and is part of the £1.5bn Leeds Innovation Arc.
Deb Hetherington, SGI’s Director of Innovation Ecosystems, says: “It is a unique building – not a developer’s dream by any stretch. There are listed areas, parts that you wouldn’t necessarily determine to be commercially viable but it has the ability to galvanise activity in the health innovation space.
“Access to funding networks will be key. The sell from Scarborough will be very bespoke support programmes around health innovation and associated funding and access to test your innovation on live data. That will draw smaller businesses. The larger ones will want to co-locate with the entrepreneurial businesses because it is almost outsourced research and development for them.”
This article originally appeared in Yorkshire Business Insider