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The Mayor of ������վ, Councillor Sharmila Sivarajah, has officially named the ������վ Innovation Centre in a ceremony on 19 March. Councillor Sivarajah was accompanied by Councillor Atif Nawaz, Cabinet member for Planning and Economic Development.

The ������վ Innovation Centre, located in the heart of the Manor Royal Business District, is aimed at helping create more than 200 new jobs and benefit directly up to 40 businesses. It will bring a further much-needed economic, innovation and technological boost to the town, drawing on ������վ’s long-standing reputation in advanced manufacturing and engineering.

The Innovation Centre building, which will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, benefits from greener and cleaner energy and heating systems alongside high sustainability and energy efficiency standards. This includes solar panels on the roof, air sourced heat pumps for heating and cooling, and electric vehicle charging points in the car park. 

The centre will be a major asset to support ������վ’s existing advanced engineering businesses and to enable growth in new and emerging business sectors such as clean energy and quantum technologies. It will provide vital “grow-on” space which will enable hi-tech small businesses to “scale up”, prototype and demonstrate new technologies in clean energy, quantum tech and transportation tech. In the longer term, the aim is to help attract significant new manufacturing business investment into ������վ, including at new industrial space in Manor Royal.

The centre will actively engage with ������վ College and the Universities of Brighton, Chichester and Sussex on opportunities for small businesses to access tech apprenticeships and skills on, research, tech innovation and development.  The centre will accommodate hi-tech academic “spin out” micro-enterprises from the universities, providing larger innovation spaces for budding academic entrepreneurs to develop their tech products.