Core Technology Facility- An Update from UMIC

Thursday 15th December, 2005

Firstly I would like to start by offering all our colleagues, tenants, clients and service providers Season’s Greetings and best wishes for a prosperous New Year. I would like to particularly thank all our tenants for their cooperation and understanding throughout the construction phase for The Core Technology Facility (CTF).

These are exciting times for all of us at UMIC. What began as a series of design drawings followed by a long construction period, is finally taking shape and indeed is very close to completion. You may recall that this time last year, we were celebrating reaching the top of the build phase, with a topping out ceremony. Subsequent milestones involved becoming (almost) weather-tight in March and then agreement to conduct the fit-out phase during the construction programme, with HBG Ltd., the contractors. This inevitably led to an extension of the contract from October 05 through to December 05, but with the positive outcome that over 75% of the building would now be fully fitted out. I hope that the few of you who have been on site with me might agree that the decision to fit-out during construction has significantly enhanced development.

So, here we are, close to completion and now scheduling the decanting of our first tenants in the CTF, the University of Manchester, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine. We are looking forward to receiving David Eisner (Cardiology) and Mark Dunne (Diabetes) and to welcoming them and their groups to what we hope will be a most exciting and stimulating environment. These groups will be moving in February 06, giving UMIC time to recruit and train new Facilities Management staff in order to continue to provide the high quality of services provided to our tenants to date.

Concurrently, great attention is being given to the new Conferencing Facilities that will be available for hire in the CTF. This area comprises an ‘egg-shaped’ auditorium that will contain a media wall (with all the necessary ICT support) to house up to 100 people. Alongside this are two partitioned (meeting rooms able to hold 50 people in open plan and 25 in closed format. Likewise, and based on experience with requirements for our existing meeting rooms in the Manchester Incubator, we have provided for 4 (work-horse) rooms equivalent in size to our Small Meeting Room These rooms will all be sound-proofed and contain the latest audio-visual capability. . We are very excited about this new feature available and feel that you, as tenants, will derive great benefit from having this service available for hire, through a newly reformatted intranet system. This system will be the main communication vehicle for tenants looking to book meeting rooms and any associated catering, from our current catering contractors, Avenance. Further details on booking arrangements will be provided shortly.

An additional new feature will be The Street area at the front of CTF, which we hope will be a thriving, bustling, interactive area for tenants, investors, biotech business support, and academic colleagues alike. In here, we plan to install a new deli-bar facility for “grab and go” food that will be supported by a tabled seating area. This will complement the associated catering services currently available in Hickman’s restaurant and Starbuck’s bar in the current Incubator; we hope to extend the level of choice to our tenants and their guests alike.

The environment we are trying to create is to augment that of the current Incubator, and is based on feedback from existing tenants during the conceptualisation phase of the CTF; an interactive but confidential environment. Developing such an environment brings with it distinctive challenges and comes at a cost, but we are delighted with what has been achieved so far.

The next stage, of course, is to attract quality tenants looking primarily for grow-on space, post incubation. We have already identified a number of companies of this type, so please watch this space in the coming weeks for news of future tenants in the commercial areas of CTF.

The furniture is on order now and we are looking at plants and paintings for the interactive areas; it feels quite strange but we are now in a position to say, finally, that we will be open for business in January 06.

Once again, Happy Xmas to all our tenants and their families and see you all in the New Year.

Figure 1: Frontal aspect of CTF

Figure 2: Side aspect of CTF

Figure 3: Reception area in progress

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