Steer Economic Development was commissioned by East Midlands Councils to produce an Options Paper examining the scope for establishing a new science and innovation hub at Toton (Nottinghamshire). The work was part of the wider commission involving consultants Ekosgen, who had been examining the economic potential of the Toton and its adjacent land and property assets as the prospect of an HS2 station came into view.
Steer Economic Development’s brief was to pay particular attention to the new science and innovation opportunities that improved connectivity provided by HS2 might unlock. Accordingly, we thought through in detail potential ideas for innovation-related developments over the coming 15+ years.
This posed several challenges given the rapid pace of advances in science and innovation – advances that create the risk that concepts compelling today, in the light of current circumstances, might likely be obsolete or require significant redesign by the time on-the-ground construction commences. These challenges highlighted the key need for downstream flexibility and reversibility in the ideas and options that the team came forward with.
Our recommended response was that an over-arching design concept for science and innovation could be structured as three complementary waves of investments. Each of these waves would build on preceding layers of capability and experience. The proposed waves were:
An innovation hotel precinct and high-end office space: extending the boundaries of temporary accommodation (the ‘hotel’ and its associated services for travellers) to encompass functional spaces specifically designed to facilitate creative collaboration in research and innovation.
Agile innovation and research collaboration facilities: allowing exploratory ‘try before you buy’ collaborations to take place quickly and cheaply.
More ambitious cutting-edge facilities with a high-profile national interest dimension. For example, an HS2-enabled clinical innovation treatment facility might be appropriate for Toton, where innovative medical engineering projects might be undertaken alongside a National Major Incident Response Hub (using HS2 connectivity for a national major incident response centre), and perhaps in due course a National Centre for Emergency Innovation.
The work was well received by our client and is now being used as one of the inputs to identify how best to optimise the ‘Toton HS2 opportunity’.
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