Acting as Innovation and Economic Adviser to Bruntwood Properties

ID Manchester is a 4.5 million ft.² site in the centre of Manchester, having functioned formally as a campus for the University of Manchester’s Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). Described as ‘the last great city-centre regeneration site in the UK’, the University of Manchester had launched in summer 2019 an international competition to select a partner with whom to co-develop the site, establishing a new applied innovation district (hence the ‘ID’) focused on four of the University’s six Research Beacons.

Against this background, Steer Economic Development was commissioned by Bruntwood SciTech, the UK science park developer/operator, to act as Innovation and Economic Adviser to the first stage of the competition (the so-called ‘Selection Questionnaire’ stage), advertised internationally in the OJEU.

Our role was to help Bruntwood think through in headline terms what ‘applied innovation’ might mean in the context of the site and the University’s four research Beacons areas, and to ensure that the imperative for such innovation was front-and-centre in the logic of Burntwood’s Selection Questionnaire response.

In December 2019, it was announced that Bruntwood had been successful in proceeding to Stage 2 of the project competition, which focused on the development of an ‘Outline Solution’. Again, Steer Economic Development was commissioned non-competitively by Bruntwood SciTech to act as Innovation and Economic Adviser to the Bruntwood consortium for this second phase of work.