Cardiff University has a thriving innovation culture and excels in connecting industry, business, and government with academics, nurturing student entrepreneurship and championing grass-roots business development.
New development sbarc | spark, located on the Cardiff Innovation Campus, has been described as a new hub for this innovation culture, and offers an attractive and stimulating environment designed to encourage out-of-the-ordinary creative thinking and the exploration of new possibilities.
Designed by award-winning architects Hawkins\Brown, the building will work with business and society to create, test, and incubate new initiatives, and will be the home of businesses, researchers, and students to work across disciplines and with partners to influence policy and build enterprises that create products, spinouts, start-ups, and social enterprises.
Karen Holford, Deputy Vice Chancellor at Cardiff University, spoke to Business News Wales about the vision for CardiffInnovations@sbarc and how creating this environment would support not only a stimulating setting for creative interactions and collaborations, but also a space to allow inter-disciplinary research and translational innovation activity had been so far.
The building designs are hugely impressive, and what is more impressive is how construction and delivery will be completed at a time that is quite challenging in terms of the innovation landscape in Wales. With this in mind, the hopes for the CIC to be able to help support further long-term future allocation of UK Research and Innovation funding are high.
Ultimately, a better ‘socio-ecological ’understanding of innovation will strengthen the links to the work of social science-led research centres like those in sbar . The goal is that this development will help to strengthen social and economic wellbeing in Wales following a turbulent past year due to the pandemic.
Listen below to hear more from Karen Holford on how she sees this building impacting Wales and the business community that thrives within it
