By Angie Reynolds, Chief Operating Officer at University of Birmingham Enterprise and Board Director at the UK Science Park Association (UKSPA). 

Birmingham Research Park is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Any milestone creates an opportunity to take stock about where you’ve come from and where you’re going – which seems timely given ongoing debates about what a difference location makes in an era of flexible working.  

The concept of a science park has changed a lot over the last 40 years. It has evolved from a focal point for traditional ‘hard science’ businesses to set up laboratory space, to a much more diverse set-up that fuses together science, technology, data and software companies. Today, over 130 such clusters exist across the UK¹, concentrating talent, skills, research, and much more – and demonstrating the value of place in an ultra-connected world.  

Challenging a growing consensus 

Since the pandemic, a ‘location agnostic’ view has emerged. It holds that in the age of hybrid working and remote calls, distance has become less important. This view has been growing in popularity because it seems logical that if you can reduce rent costs, and hire from a much wider geographic pool, why wouldn’t you?  

I think that’s wrong because it misses something critical. For most R&D-led companies, their most important asset is talent. And by and large, talent is attracted to (or repelled from) a place depending on considerations including cost of living, transport links and sense of community. It’s the reason that the ‘golden triangle’, Kendall Square and Silicon Valley have entered our lexicon – we name them because they encapsulate something special. In 2014, Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner defined innovation districts as geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators, and accelerators². They recognised the importance of location beyond the laboratories and offices, and they were right.  

That isn’t to say hybrid working won’t stay, as many employees value flexibility and it can help employers better manage space needs, but it is undeniable that early career professionals need and benefit from face-to-face learning opportunities. The trend toward an ever more remote workforce is now being recalibrated as business leaders recognise that culture and a shared sense of purpose are harder to develop through a screen³.  

As Lin, Frey, and Wu demonstrated in their 2023 Nature study, while digital tools allow for global coordination, they often fail at the ‘conceptual fusion’ required for breakthroughs. Their analysis of millions of patents confirms that teams in physical proximity are consistently more likely to produce disruptive innovation than their remote counterparts⁴. 

This change and recognition that place does matter is also partly a consequence of our evolving understanding of what it means to be a science and technology company in 2026. We are expanding the scope from a traditional view of ‘wet science’ through to a broader one which includes AI, data-assisted science, climate tech and advanced manufacturing, with notable examples being ARM and DeepMind.  

This is no coincidence.  

If clusters have demonstrated anything, it is that serendipitous interactions between seemingly unrelated businesses create new opportunities. Take Qiagen’s 2018 decision to choose to establish their European Centre of Excellence for Precision Medicine in Manchester’s Oxford Road Corridor. Their decision to co-locate alongside a university teaching hospital and the University of Manchester was anchored in a desire to co-develop and benefit from a porous academic-health-industry environment. 

Location is shaping clinical progress 

Universities and cities are talent factories. From Exeter to Aberdeen, our academic institutions and developed urban centres are magnets for bright, energetic and curious people that power many science and technology businesses to success.  

To illustrate why this is important – and what value it can bring – consider life sciences. A sector that successive governments have seen as a key economic priority and one of the few where the UK is globally competitive. Part of that is down to our excellent research institutions, but it is also because we have many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms, a single public health provider with longitudinal health data, and deep pools of scientific expertise.   

But we can’t talk about health innovation – whether in medical devices or biotechnology – without talking about data. Being able to understand, analyse and deploy insights is going to be critical to maintaining the UK’s global competitiveness as AI starts to influence molecule design, and Real-World-Evidence (RWE) studies accelerate medical device rollouts.  

The new Health Data Research Service (HDRS)⁵ has been set up to leverage health data to help researchers to develop more effective treatments, and many of the world’s largest AI and data science companies are making investments in the UK, particularly in health. Yet for many companies in the regions, national advantages like this can feel abstract. This is where science parks and ecosystems like the Edinburgh BioQuarter are so critical – they translate national assets into local commercial impact.  

In Birmingham, the university acts as a gravitational pull for health innovators. The Precision Health Technologies Accelerator, which houses the clinical immunology service; and the HealthTech AiHub, which has supported 74 companies and developed an AI integration strategy for 27 of them, are just two examples of ecosystem spokes in action.  

On the clinical trial front, the Birmingham Clinical Trials Unit (BCTU) has been providing clinicians with scientific, technical and computing expertise to support every stage of their research for 25 years across almost every disease and condition. Their infrastructure and expertise are supporting Professor Dipak Kotecha’s DaRe2THINK⁶, a new way of running clinical trials at general practices in the NHS, using health information already collected in the NHS to reduce the burden of data collection.  

It’s proximity to Birmingham Research Park has created collaborative opportunities for companies to support its roll out, including for Dexter AI, a data spinout behind an application that extracts analysable datasets from electronic health records and was used to support clinical code list development and the validation of phenotypes⁷. 

Where next? 

Science Parks have had a critical role in the UK’s national story. From Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ speech in 1963 that paved the way for the first science park to set up in Cambridge in 1970, to the current government’s UK Modern Industrial Strategy8, the economic and human potential of science and innovation (and the spaces and places that facilitate it) has been at the centre of our politics and popular culture.  

They have been an enabler of innovation across the sciences – from biological breakthroughs to material discoveries – and have evolved from single site entities to become the nucleus of new and bigger clusters and ecosystems, which combine infrastructure and connectivity to create the conditions in which innovators can collaborate, share knowledge and prosper.  

This is why I believe that prophecies about the decline of physical space and the emergence of fully remote businesses are overdone. Those scaling businesses I speak to like Celentyx argue that their success is down to the people and the? the place that they call home. Humans are social and want to work with others – experimenting in a laboratory, initiating new ideas over chance coffee encounters, gaining new connections by joining workshops with others who have been there before and are now giving back.  

Location does matter. It matters more than a lot of people think it does. Where you find talent, you can find solutions. And what is science and technology about, if not solutions?  

References

[1] https://www.ukspa.org.uk/about-ukspa/

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/innovationdistricts1.pdf

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janesparrow/2025/10/07/why-leaders-need-to-rethink-the-work-from-home-debate/

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06767-1

[5] https://www.england.nhs.uk/blog/health-data-research-service-unlocking-the-potential-of-health-and-care-data-to-transform-lives/

[6] https://www.dare2think.org/dare2think-trial/

[7] https://academic.oup.com/ehjdh/article/3/3/426/6701815