Warwick: a byword for UK innovation
It is a year of anniversaries for the University of Warwick. The University itself is marking 60 years since its foundation, while its ground-breaking Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) was established 45 years ago.
In 1965, under its first Vice-Chancellor, Lord Butterworth, Warwick sparked a revolution in UK higher education by becoming the first university to develop close links with the business community and exploit the commercial value of its research. Lord Butterworth was credited by Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya as his mentor as he launched the Warwick Manufacturing Group in 1980.
Those industry links were deepened by the opening of the University’s science park in 1984. Warwick Science Park (WSP) was one of the UK’s first university-based science parks and now spans four locations: The Venture Centre, Business Innovation Centre in Coventry, Warwick Innovation Centre in Warwick, and Blythe Valley Innovation Centre in Shirley.
It has recently expanded to a fifth site, sharing space on the University of Warwick Innovation Campus in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Meanwhile, the University has created the Warwick Innovation District, with former Conservative Cabinet Minister Greg Clark appointed as its first executive chair last year.
Commenting at the time of his appointment, Greg Clark said: “The creation of the Warwick Innovation District is part of the University’s vision to ensure that education and research drive positive economic and societal impact in collaboration with the public and private sectors. It will build upon WMG’s work over four decades as a role model for collaboration between academia and industry, driving innovation to develop the brightest ideas and talent”.
The Warwick Innovation District will oversee developments such as Arden Cross, a regeneration project to be anchored by a HealthTech Campus, and the expansion of the Innovation Campus, Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as the University’s Science Park.
Supporting new sectors
Against this background, Mark Tock, Chief Operating Officer of University of Warwick Science Park, is overseeing a period of change and expansion, both in terms of facilities and the breadth of work.
While Warwick’s focus on engineering and manufacturing innovation led to the rise of WMG, the work at the Innovation Campus at Wellesbourne, a former DEFRA site, has seen the creation of Warwick Agritech in a combined venture between the University’s School of Life Sciences and WMG.
Mark Tock explained: “The School of Life Sciences at Wellesbourne is working on crop research, agriculture and botany, while WMG have been delivering robotics and digitalisation to industry for decades.
“Over the last 12 to 18 months, we've seen the interesting evolution of the coming together of those two departments into Warwick Agritech, focused on the concept of addressing productivity in agriculture by bringing the lessons WMG has learned and its research and capabilities from working predominantly with the automotive and aerospace industries.
“The result is glasshouses with robots weeding, patrolling, tending the plants, carrying out the functions that a human would normally do and, in addition, we’re looking at breeding crops which better suit an automated environment. It’s a super hi-tech productivity step that is really interesting.”
Warwick Manufacturing Group
Professor David Greenwood, CEO of WMG’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult and director for industrial engagement sees recent developments as building on Warwick’s heritage: “You've got a university that is celebrating its 60th year, having been born out of an entrepreneurial spirit, linking academia with business. We have established ourselves as the university of choice for leading car manufacturers.
“The vision of Professor Lord Bhattacharyya around 1980 was very much to improve the quality of the management and technical capabilities of the UK auto industry, which was not a particularly pretty sight in the 1970s and 80s.
“The focus there was definitely to bring the best of industry and the best of academia together for the benefit of industry.
“As it turns out, over the years, that's widened in focus to engineering materials and now process-driven industries and sectors like Agritech. What WMG does now covers an enormous breadth of high-value manufacturing, which is why it’s one of only six High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC) centres.”
Operating from centres around the country, the HVMC is a Government-backed strategic research and innovation hub for industry, aiming to commercialise the UK’s most advanced manufacturing ideas.
Professor Greenwood continued: “WMG’s initial vision hasn't actually changed. At its core, it's been pretty constant: to deliver the knowledge, skills and technology needed by industry now and in the future.
“That reflects the journey of innovation within the UK economy. Actually, it's two things. It's that innovation is both sequential and additive, but it also involves certain step changes which might evolve, transferring learnings from one industry sector to another.
“What has changed is how WMG now supports a much wider group of industries. The technologies and skills we're developing and teach have evolved hugely over four and a half decades. Which is just astounding.
“At a research-intensive university that is 60 years old, WMG has been an absolute bulwark of manufacturing innovation for 45 years, which coincidentally overlaps with one of the UK’s oldest science parks, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. So, you can see how those things came together.
“Physically, at one point, Warwick Science Park and the University were fields apart. Both have grown, but a large part of that space in between is occupied by WMG. So, we have facilities like the National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC), developed with JLR and Tata as key innovation collaborators and partners with the University. And that’s a 33,000 square metre building.
“WMG is also carrying out postgraduate training, as well as applied research and near-market research. A large part of what WMG does is blue sky research, but an equally large portion of the research that we do is near-market, the stuff that you can see make an impact in the shorter term. It’s quite inspirational in the way that our teams work.
“We have the Advanced Propulsion Research Laboratory (APRL) in the NAIC building for testing engine components and electric powertrains within sealed, controlled environments that go from very low negative temperatures to Saharan conditions.
“We can test pretty much any kind of component you would see in terms of engineering, and these facilities sit side-by-side in the middle of a university campus within easy walking distance of the science precinct.
“There’s even a battery abuse centre where the University figures out what happens to a battery if any one of a number of unpleasant situations arise. But it also looks to identify second-life uses for car batteries.
“When they are no longer useful to power vehicles, there will still be some capacity left, so they can still have a useful second life. And then there is the question of how you recycle them without all the attendant pollution. That becomes increasingly important as the number of electric vehicles increases.”
The expansion of its reach has also seen physical growth for WMG. It occupies 13 buildings on the main Warwick campus and across the Science Park, as well as teaching remotely across the world in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Azerbaijan.
“It’s become an enormous enterprise – WMG probably has more than £100 million of research assets. WMG has grown to just under 1,000 staff since its foundation, and it accounts for about £140 a year in turnover. And then there are the students in the Degree Apprenticeship building at WMG – around 1,000 of them.
“With its links to the HVMC network, WMG has become influential in terms of shaping national industrial and engineering policy. Take something like the Faraday Battery Challenge: it enabled companies like JLR to move into electric vehicles and has supported thousands of regional SMEs in that supply chain, leading to 10,000s of jobs and quite literally billions of pounds in terms of GVA in the UK.”
Warwick Science Park
Mark Tock continued: “There is a notional boundary between the Science Park campus and the University of Warwick main campus, and it's particularly in the area where WMG has its facilities, alongside the Degree Apprenticeship building. But we're increasingly trying to make that boundary more porous because the best and most effective form of knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange comes in the form of people.”
“A large number of our tenants – both big names and lesser-known names – come because they're attracted by the potential to locate within an easy walk of WMG. We have Bosch Mobility UK, LG, Lotus at the Stratford site, and Drive Systems Design, owned by Hinduja Tech, a major Indian conglomerate doing loads of automotive and engineering testing.
“We have designers like Simpact Engineering and P3 Mobility R&D, which is a subsidiary of Rimac, the Croatian hypercar company.
“As a science park we are quite agnostic. That gives an enormous opportunity for those areas of overlap where emerging tech comes from. That’s why we're quite excited about things like the rise of agritech.
“Apart from the use of robots, it also brings in capabilities from autonomous vehicle technology and the use of drones.”
Warwick Science Park currently houses just over 160 resident companies – a 30% increase over the last three years.
“Our ten-year strategy looks to increase the number of resident companies to 300,” said Mark. “That means we have to build. In this case, we have to revive, rebuild, refurbish or repurpose. We have some buildings that are 40 years old. If we want to create space for wet labs and bioscience, we need to repurpose one of our old office buildings.
“This will be the Vanguard Centre; it will be redesigned to give us 14,000 sq ft of wet lab space, which could also support electronics or medical devices if necessary. It will also give us another 8,000 sq ft of office space.
“We are turning a currently unlettable office into a higher value, higher yielding property to support a sector where we already have the Warwick Medical School alongside WMG and the Business School.
“It gives us an absolutely immense offer to the world.
“There is so much here that is just inspiring. And the appointment of Greg Clark as Chair of Warwick Innovation District really ties together the industrial engagement that WMG is well known and well respected for, with the kind of activity that the Science Park supports with the Warwick Innovation group.
“It is joining everything together, with staff, student and alumni innovation, taking us from concept into areas as varied as deep tech, fintech, biotech, engineering and manufacturing, AI… It’s endless.
“And we can take it all the way through academic study and entrepreneurship to starting a company and engaging with the wider business community. There's a potential there for consortia that I've not seen anywhere else, and that's particularly exciting.”
Creating a better tomorrow For more information, please go to warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg or warwicksciencepark.co.uk