Hustle Awards 2025 Special: ARC - Advanced Research Clusters, Winner of Workspace of the Year

0:00Welcome back to The Serial Entrepreneur, I'm your host Anna Wood. On today's episode, I'm joined by Jenny Gardner, the Development Director at ARC Advanced Research Clusters. We discuss its work in creating inclusive and flexible workspaces for the science and innovation clusters, Moderna's new manufacturing facility at its Harwell campus, and winning Workspace of the Year at the Hustle Awards 2025. Let's dig in. Well, thank you. And yourselves? Yeah, I'm very good. Thank you. Thank you for calling on today. Of course. So we start every podcast episode with the same icebreaker question, which is, what's your favorite breakfast cereal and why?

0:45Oh my gosh, it's so embarrassing. I had to say I'm a Weedabix girl. And when I wrote it down in my notes, I thought, I'm the most boring person there ever was. however I think at the end of the day it's just it's flexible it's flexible with everything that I've got in the kitchen and in the refrigerator at any given point in time and I can get a lot of health cracked out of it in one fell swoop first thing in the morning so efficiency and health as the the rationale behind it but fully appreciate it's not anything near what my children are eating and the more creative things that are available out there do you ever put anything on your wheat a bit.

1:27Yeah, I cover it in chia seeds most days and whatever fruit is available that my children haven't eaten. That's not boring, you're changing it up. I suppose so. So to begin, would you be able to introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your background? Of course. So I am the development director for ARC, for Advanced Research Clusters. I'm I focus on Harwell campus. Out of our portfolio, we've got three different campuses, and I focus on Harwell campus. My background is effectively life science development. So I started in America right out of university. I started with a life science developer in 2007, which was at the beginning of the trend of life science development in America.

2:21So I was sort of on the front end trend nearly 20 years ago. And then did that from an administrative perspective in the beginning and then slowly but surely worked my way into the development world and into project management. And then transitioned to the UK in 2021 with my family and very quickly learned that the life science development world here was on the upward trend. So managed to find my way back into a similar sort of role that I used to have working to support the innovation economy. Yeah. Amazing. So speaking about ARK, what is it and what is its mission and purpose? So ARK is a real estate platform.

3:06It was built from the ground up in around 2020, 2021, established by Brookfield. Brookfield Asset Management are our investment partners. They established our company by buying out 50 % of Harwell Campus. So we have a joint venture here at Hartwell Campus. And subsequently, they purchased Arlington Portfolio, which is another real estate developer. And now we are one big company. So it was effectively, there's 50 of us today. And we develop, design, build, manage innovation economy assets. Great. So when it comes to startup, how does ARK support startups and what do you offer them? So we have a variety of things that we do.

3:55I would say we'll start on sort of my side of the equation. So I work in the development team, so design and construction. So I think in my personal work and the work of our company, we think a lot about these small companies, specifically with the life science sector, but also, you know, within our space, energy, quantum, all of the sectors, effectively, how we can support these small companies. and I think about it a lot in the design sense and construction sense in terms of capital. They don't have a lot of money and time. Not a lot of capital and not a lot of time. So we will go and we've created a concept called Mother Labs where we are building out these small spaces for small startup companies to be able to move in and start doing their science on day one so they don't have to come up with the, you know, they don't have to go hire a designer and a project manager and a construction company, which is none of their skill sets.

4:53Effectively, they want to get in and do their science and do it well and be able to raise additional capital to continue to scale and grow. So we take all that away from them. We take all that burden away. We're specifically designing spaces where not only could you move in and start doing your science on day one, but you can also then proceed to customize it to a certain extent within the science community. As you can imagine, there's some baseline needs that they all have, but then there's a lot of fluctuations from there for their specific science because they're all trying to trademark something and trying to do something new and innovative.

5:28And inevitably, that translates into different requirements within a building. So our entire job and our entire work within that sector and within that sort of startup, scale-up environment is to try to provide as much of the foundations as we can, try to take as much of the workload off of them as we possibly can, but still provide that flexibility. So we do that through our mother lads concept and then a slightly larger scale. So scaling spaces to up to call it 15 people. So six people up to 15 people. So that's on the physical side of the equation. But then I would say that we also have, once an occupant would move into our buildings, It transfers into our operational team.

6:10So there's a lot of programs that our marketing and communities are put together to try to bring people together, whether that be how to set up your LinkedIn profile all the way through to how to raise venture capital. So not only are they connecting the people with one another, other industry, other groups that are in the same boat, effectively, right? They're all trying to learn how to market their product, how to be able to translate their product from something big and complicated and science savvy to venture capital companies, which perhaps don't understand all the nuances, but they need to be able to translate that to those companies.

6:43So we'll set up programs to help them with that translational conversation. And then, you know, the softer side of things, too, hosting ice cream socials and things like that just to bring people together so that they're actually having fun or yoga or, you know, more health-centric activities. So there's a whole raft of things that happen once you're actually in the buildings that our operations people control and facilitate. And it's been really successful. Yeah, amazing. So how do you curate an environment that genuinely fosters innovation and collaboration? I would say that there's sort of a baseline when you're designing and building a space of baseline requirements, especially within a laboratory environment.

7:30There's certain fundamental things you have to have for science to be able to be safe and practical. But where I would say that where it gets interesting in terms of genuinely fostering the collaboration, we spend an enormous amount of time thinking about the spaces between the spaces. So here at Harwell, I would say the landscapes are incredibly important. Like when you're walking from point A to point B, how you're interacting with those landscapes. Are you sitting on a bench beside someone? There's a cricket pitch. You can go play rounders. You can join a team. You can go, you know, go with your colleagues out and sit under a tree and have a conversation.

8:12And, you know, we try really hard. And within the buildings, you've got cafes and restaurants and events and things like that where we're actively engaging and pulling people in. And we've put a lot of time and thought into who the people are, how they might interact with their spaces, how we can ensure that we're doing the best that we can to encourage and create more of those opportunities. So it's not just about kind of the workspace itself. It's about kind of building a community within the people there. Exactly. Yeah. And everything around it, from a physical to programs, to the communication.

8:49They've got, you know, we've got an app which actively encourages people to come to all these events. I think there's something like 200 events a year here, just even at Harwell campus. And that's not even bringing our other campus into the conversation. Yeah, that's amazing. So what sectors or types of technologies have you seen gain the most traction within your clusters? I'm speaking for Harwell specifically, and I can't speak for Hammersmith or for Arc Oxford with this because this isn't at the other campuses. But the space sector has been incredibly healthy and growing at pace here on campus.

9:28We have 105, I believe, commercial space companies here at Harwell campus. So I often have to, because I work in the space industry, I have to point up. Like, I work in space, you know, rather than like when I use the term space most of the time I'm talking about property. But it's quite fascinating how many different directions space can go and there's upstream and downstream and all these different angles that I've learned about over the last few years since I'm coming to this campus. And it's fascinating because then that type of sector then will sort of blend in and out of the other sectors that we have here on campus, like the energy sector, for instance.

10:09Like, how can you make the smallest battery, the lightest weight battery possible to get up into space? And then you take that battery, because we've got the energy sector here, take that battery and you put it back into a big national satellite testing facility, into their vats, and you test it to see what happens when you send that battery to space. And so the different sectors can work with one another, which is quite fascinating. So they can help each other grow. But the space sector alone has been incredibly powerful here on campus. and they interact with the public sector infrastructure.

10:41And so it's been a real success story, I would say. And then I would say that the health sector slash life sciences is gaining momentum right behind that. It's really interesting that there's so many space companies at just the one campus. It's so cool. It's, you know, we have a company that does cleanup. Their entire business model is to go up into space and to collect all the debris and bring it back down to Earth. And then, you know, not that we have them here, but then there's like the government type companies, which are trying to create international laws that require satellite companies to bring their rubbish back down to Earth, you know.

11:19So and then we've got the company here that will go and collect it. So it's quite fascinating how many different angles there are to it and how many different companies there are that are all focusing on their own little piece of the puzzle. Yeah, that is really cool. so how do you measure the impact that arc has on its local communities and its innovation output um i don't know you know it's funny i don't know if it's measured per se i was thinking about this and how how if at all we measure it um we do a lot of work with local communities through you know through my work for the construction projects we've got about 300 million pounds worth of of development happening just here at Harwell.

12:03And as part of our responsibility with that development, we have to, we do, we interact with the local communities, not just because we have to, but because we want to. Doing skills training and bringing people onto campus, bringing the schools into the campus. And there's a lot of work that goes on, but how we actually measure it is something I think that we could probably do better at, if I'm honest, because I would be interested to know the output of all the work that we do with the communities. I would say from a company success standpoint, the measure of success is what companies do when they grow or they shrink.

12:42So when you work in this sort of environment, especially within the innovation economy, you are constantly looking for additional funding to grow, especially if it's in the life science world. You're trying to get your bench to bedside, your product all the way into a human body. and from bench to bedside, there's a whole wrath of stages you have to go through. And a lot of times you get to a certain point and then need to go backwards, right? And you need to start over or restructure or you merge or you get acquired or there's so many different things that can happen in the course of a 10 to 15 year timeline.

13:18And I would say the measure of success for us as a company is what happens to those companies when they have those milestones, ideally growing obviously that's the the goal of everyone but also if they need to shrink you know if they've if they've grown too fast or too big or they need to pivot and change change course but they they they still want to stay with us because we will work with them and whether that's in a it's obviously in a space a physical space standpoint because that's what the nature of the business we work in but how can we how can we work together and do they have that dialogue with our team and us to come and say we have this is our situation how can you help us and because we have so much scale and we have so much space we're able to be those partners for our clients which is really satisfying and I think a measure of success yeah definitely would you be able to talk a bit more about kind of what you do with the local communities that you mentioned Hmm.

14:14Sure. Yeah. So we we recently brought in the SEND schools. So the local area SEND schools will come on to our construction sites. And we've done that for three or four of the sites where they come and they interact with with our builders and we'll host different sessions so they understand the the work that we're doing. And then we, you know, take them to lunch and help them develop some of their skills around whether and also explain what some of the jobs are in the industry. It's all going. I'll talk about what I do, because frankly, I had no idea what I did existed when I was a kid. But we'll bring on our architects and our contractors and our design managers and all these sort of different different types of opportunities that exist within within my world.

14:58And so we'll bring the schools in and explain how our different skill sets work and the different jobs that are available in our industry. Once every couple of years, we open the entirety of Harwell campus up to the local communities. So they actually come onto site. And I think a lot of times people have this disconnect with what happens. Harwell, where I work, used to be a nuclear site. So I think in the minds of some of the communities, it's still a nuclear site. So it's this big, scary, behind-the-fence world, but it's really not. So they'll open up the campus. I haven't opened it. And I think it was over 10 ,000 people from the local communities that just want to come.

15:35and see what's happening and engage with the campus, which is really quite cool. We've got a number of restaurants here on Zite where the money made at the restaurants, I think they made more profit from the local communities than they did from the 7 ,500 people at work here on campus because it's open. So I think that open and engaging and having those conversations is important. And then there's the less, I guess, advertisable things, but also equally important that we're doing big donations out and back into the communities and to local charity groups that need it. So it kind of goes all over the place.

16:13I think we've brought, how is it? I think it's Oxlap in to do skills training. We've worked with a group that's ex-convicts that have a bakery. I think it's called Fruit Bakery out of Oxfordshire. So we'll bring them and actually have them bring food in for events and things. So it's actually really good. And so I think we're always looking for more and more ways to interact and get really excited. The entire ethos of our company gets really excited about that sort of opportunity. So the more, the better, I would say. Yeah, that is amazing. So what do you think differentiates ARK from competitors in the market?

16:53I think probably the biggest one is just scale. We have a lot of space. And between the three campuses, I think we're the second largest provider of space in the innovation sector in the country. And the other one happens to be sort of Manchester-based. so in terms of the the golden triangle we're the the single largest provider of space so we have that with scale comes a lot of opportunity like i was mentioning before the ability to grow and shrink and move and pivot and all those different things and the programs that you get access to if you're a startup company of five people you get access to all these things just like the the modernas of the world who have hundreds of employees you get access to the same sort of programs and opportunities that they do.

17:46And so because we can take anywhere from the company with five people up to companies with half a million square feet. And in addition to that, at least here where I work, we've got an additional 1.5 million square feet of additional pipeline to come. So if it's a mega company that came, we could take them too. So the dialogue is always there. Not that our competitors aren't doing a great job. I'm sure they are. Like I mentioned before, there's sort of a baseline of requirements to get a good building. And a lot of people are doing really good buildings, but not a lot of people could match our scale.

18:23I would also say that some of the work, including the recognition that we've gotten from the Hustle Awards related to neurodiversity and things of that nature, although I hope our competitors do pick them up because I think the entire industry needs to hear it and needs to be tuned into it. They haven't yet. So we started to actually build the spaces that continue on that theme of inclusive labs and things like that where we're really thinking about the end user and how they experience their space and how we approach them and how we communicate with them and how we interact and become good partners with these individuals and these companies that are very not never places.

19:06So I don't think that our competitors are doing it yet. Like I said, I hope that they do. And it can only benefit everyone if and when they do. But at the moment, I think it sets us apart. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's a good segue into my next question, which is, so you've won the Workspace of the Year Award at the Hustle Awards, so congratulations on that. So how did that make you feel? And what does that mean for ARK? I think it's important to be recognized. I think it's important to, especially in front of the startup community, and I think it's important for those people, especially the young people who I think are more in tune to it than perhaps the older generations, to know that there's landlords out there that care and that are listening.

20:01and that don't necessarily look at themselves as just landlords, but as genuine partners to our people. So I think getting that recognition in front of the right audience and not just another box ticking exercise, which I feel like some of the awards can be occasionally, is important and vital to just getting our message out there. And like I mentioned before, part of me hopes that the competitors hear it as well and that they pick up because I really do think if we all do start to design for the whole mind, it will be a better, more profitable business for all of us. Bottom line, day-to-day, general happiness.

20:44I think that it can only be a positive. Yeah, definitely. So what do you think have been some of the biggest challenges on ARK's journey so far and how has ARK overcome them? um i don't know if there's anything that's not you know just typical development challenges you know and i'm not sure that there's anything particularly unique in our challenges it's development takes time trying to to meet the demand and the time that we've got is is hard and making sure that the demand is still there when the development comes to fruition is hard. Dealing with, you know, the day-to-day minutia of traffic and planning and highways and trains is all tricky and complicated, but it's not anything that's outside of the realm of normal development problems, raising money, that sort of thing.

21:45And so I wouldn't say any of them have been insurmountable in any way or, you know, that the tricks to overcoming them have been overwhelmingly creative either. It's just sort of just, I feel like we're in a bit of that if you build it, they will come environment. And so perhaps they've got some problems coming to us in the future, but we've got an enormous amount of speculative development coming forward. And we're putting our faith into it between our investors and, you know, we all know and trust and believe in this industry. So I do think it will come, but we'll see. We just hope that the market and the government get to where they need to be alongside us.

22:28Yeah, definitely. So kind of on the flip side of that, what do you think have been some of the highlights on the journey? I would say probably one of the biggest ones is establishing the Mother Labs brand. so the the the arc branded facility to to help scaling companies that was new there are groups that have done it certainly in america and a couple of them have done it in england but i believe it's been mostly under institutional oversight not from a development standpoint not from from between us and our competitors they've done it since but establishing that that brand especially in london i think at a time when it was vital and you know the people that established it had their hearts in the right places but they sort of had to learn as they go and i think it's been a real testament to their uh due diligence and their learning and their openness and and and going out there and figuring out everything that they possibly could and learning from their mistakes and now they've duplicated that offering a lot in the sister property which is just next door and then we are duplicating again here at Harwell and again at ARC Oxford so it will end up having four four facilities at all with the Mother Labs brand which I think is a really great success story and it's specifically designed to help scaling companies so to help people that are scaling up and not a very easy business model in a real estate world because although the spaces might be expensive they're even more expensive to manage and we're trying really hard to take the pressure off of these small companies.

24:07So not only am I building them in a simple way, but we're giving them a very short lease in terms of time and in terms of physical lease. A typical lease can be over 100 pages, but these ones are like 15. So we're trying, and it's all in rent. So they take the ups and downs of running a science base out of the equation and we take the risk off of them, which I think really simplifies their lives. So the concept is proven and now it's been duplicated three and soon to be four times, which I think is a huge success story for us. And then on the complete flip side, I think the biggest success we had was securing the lease for the Moderna facility.

24:45So Moderna manufacturing plant, which is over 100 ,000 square feet, so big scale company here at Harwell. They won a government contract on the back of a COVID pandemic where they were trying to bring vaccination manufacturing back onto home soil. And they chose to come to Harwell and to come into an art brand. And so we've got the small scale companies and the big scale companies that all still want to be with us. So I think that those two things in themselves tell a big piece of the story. It's amazing that you can see innovation from kind of the earliest stages to massive company like Moderna.

25:21Yeah. And what will be even cooler, I think, is once I think that they're just about up and running the buildings done, but they've got to go through testing and things before they're actually putting products off the line. And that's when those two things start to interact with one another. So if you can get the modernas of the world to come and have sessions and have seminars with these small startup companies and they get perhaps access to funding, but also just that, you know, you've got to learn as you go. And a lot of these startups don't really have that proof of concept and that background so they can actually start to work with one another.

25:55And that sentimentality, I think, is really refreshing in this industry. The big companies want the little companies to succeed, maybe because they want to acquire them someday, you know, but for all sorts of reasons. It's also helps from a recruitment and retainer standpoint. So there's always different types of jobs available. And there's when you get to that scale. So it'll be really interesting when the building I'm working on, where Mother Lab's going to go, opens this time next year, and then trying to pull them together with the giants like Moderna and Nanopore, bring them all together and start to watch those ideas circulate around and see what happens.

26:36Yeah, because it's like you said earlier, how even now startups that are based at ARC will talk to each other and kind of work together and collaborate, and let alone what that will look like on a bigger scale as well. Yeah. Yeah. And it's cool because you also have the institutions because we are a joint venture. There is a public sector side as well. So you've got the Rosalind Franklin Institute, the Rutherford Appleton Labs, and a few others that are on the public sector side of the campus, but they still mix together. this. So we're going to start a sponsorship of the Colabs building where we're scaling science with the Rosalind Franklin Institute.

27:12So they'll come and run programs. And, you know, you start to get that camaraderie and the sharing of ideas and things between the giants and the small companies. And we can bring Moderna into that mix as well. The possibilities are limitless, really. Yeah, definitely. So kind of as one of my final questions, I wanted to ask, what does the future hold for art do you have any big plans that you can talk about no i think that i think i was actually just sort of getting into that i suppose when i'm talking about mixing these different companies together i mean we've got an and i alluded to it early in the conversation we've got an enormous amount of square footage under a speculative development pipeline at the moment 270 000 of that coming to harwell in the next 12 months and although that can sound like big scary stuff, you just think about all the possibilities because those spaces can take anywhere from, you know, the little, I'm building out, I think, 15 speculative small spaces for those companies to just move in on day one and start doing their science all the way to, you know, somebody could take 70 ,000 square feet of space on day one.

28:20You think about how many different types of science and how many different new people and new companies and new ideas and new innovations could come out of that speculative development and how exciting that can be. And then further to that, you've got another 1.5 to 2 million square feet of development that could take place on this campus alone. So for me, the future is limitless, really. And I can talk about it in physical space, but what could actually happen in the buildings is a whole realm of incredible things that I think we can't even conceive at the moment. So I think that's why I love what I do, because I think we get to create the environments and be the facilitators for some of these companies to create world-changing ideas and experiments and ultimately change people's lives.

29:14Yeah, so definitely very exciting things to come. For sure. Undoubtedly. It has to, right? Definitely. So my final question, is there anything else that you wanted to add or plug at the end of the video? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the inclusive labs that we've now built. They're open and are completing next week. And once we actually get people in those spaces and exploring those spaces and having some proof of concept and seeing where that world goes, which leads back into the Hustle Awards. But nothing new and big outside of everything I've already mentioned.