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reating the next generation of techsavvy companies, in tune with the digital era and capable of providing genuinely radical products and services, is a global challenge, but it’s being tackled with impressive success on the Innovation Birmingham Campus. It’s an ambitious initiative to bring together the public and private sector; creating connections between people with ideas, technologies, expertise, experience… and money, to stimulate collaboration and promote innovation. Some 150 technology businesses are already based on the 104,000 sq ft campus, and in February 2017, the CEO of Innovation Birmingham, Dr David Hardman, unveiled plans to deliver another 90,000 sq ft of new space by Q1 2020, which would make it the UK’s largest dedicated technology location. “We know the demand is there, because the two state-of-the-art buildings we have opened in the last year (iCentrum and the Universities Centre) are already almost fully occupied,” he says. “Our ambition and vision for Innovation Birmingham reflects the scale of opportunity this city presents. We have already become a hub for innovative digital businesses, from start-ups to scale-ups and beyond. “Now we are continuing to develop out our masterplan; to satisfy the demand from existing tenants, to provide space for those who wish to relocate here, and to be able to accommodate the new digital businesses of the future.” To fund the new space, Innovation Birmingham has appointed a team from KPMG’s Corporate Finance practice in the Midlands to seek investment, in exchange for equity stakes in the campus. That’s for the future, of course, but for now, the flagship scheme on the site is very much iCentrum; an imposing 42,000 sq ft structure which catches the eye from the outside, but whose internal design cleverly creates the
sense of being inside a towering skyscraper. Walking inside is like entering a new digital universe and the sense of energy is tangible. The open-plan design, break-out space and large restaurant area have been designed to encourage connectivity between tenants, and it clearly works. Hardman’s research suggests that growth rates on the Innovation Campus consistently run ahead of those achieved at similar techbased schemes elsewhere in the country. One of the many pioneering digital start-ups at iCentrum is Kaido Group, whose Insights platform, created with its partners at Microsoft, aims to take advantage of the huge opportunities provided by Big Data and technology to revolutionise healthcare. Put simply, it aims to combine the use of ‘actual’ intelligence, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data to deliver healthcare models which will have a profound impact on how services are delivered, across healthcare systems and the life sciences sector. Especially appealing of course to a health service desperate to cut costs, improve patient care and also eager to empower patients to better manage their health, away from underpressure hospitals and GP surgeries. March 2017 saw the launch of Kaido Wellbeing, targeted at the corporate healthcare sector, which it believes is the only health platform combining professional health expertise with AI to deliver personalised wellbeing guidance to employees. The venture was only established in November 2015, but has already attracted significant investment from the business community, and equal amount of positive attention from the region’s healthcare sector, as founder and CEO Rich Westman explains. “I was the academy strength and conditioning coach at Worcester Warriors, and before that had been at Leicester Tigers. Several of us from the Warriors had different skills, sports psychology, nutrition, fitness, and
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