Developer completes new SMART building at Innovation Birmingham
Enterprise Wharf, Birmingham’s first truly SMART building, has reached completion marking a major milestone for Bruntwood SciTech, the UK’s leading developer of city-wide innovation ecosystems and specialist environments.
The EPC A rated, 10 storey, 120,000 sq ft building has been developed for innovative occupiers to offer an innately tech-enabled environment to its users.
The embedded SMART building infrastructure will optimise user experience and wellbeing, reduce emissions and lower operational costs.
Through its smart building blueprint, Enterprise Wharf can offer more than 90 user experiences across the building, creating a significantly improved environment and working experience than would typically be experienced in any other office space.
New technologies, including state-of-the-art ‘Internet of Things’ sensors, have been embedded throughout the building, forming a ‘central nervous system’ that will provide insights into people flow, energy usage and temperature within different areas of workspaces.
Where most buildings’ systems work in independent silos, Enterprise Wharf will provide businesses with much greater visibility of what’s happening in the building, with immediate access to data allowing for real-time response to any customer or visitor challenges that arise.
To reduce the building’s wider environmental impact, Demand Side Response.
The building will also use air source heat pumps and significant solar panelling to aid its ESG objectives.
Other key features of the landmark gateway building into Birmingham city centre are a large, open plan reception and collaboration space, cycle storage, space for electric vehicle charging, showers and a private roof garden with stunning views over the city.
Businesses taking advantage of Enterprise Wharf’s SMART Grade A workspace will also benefit from its location within Bruntwood SciTech’s Innovation Birmingham campus, the West Midlands’ largest dedicated tech and digital cluster which provides coworking, serviced, and larger leased office space along with specialist business support for digital and tech businesses to help them form, scale and grow.
The completion doubles the capacity of Innovation Birmingham, which is home to more than 120 start-ups, scale-ups and global businesses across fintech, cyber security, AR, VR, blockchain, sports tech, edtech, and other tech and digital sub-sectors.
The new investment makes Bruntwood SciTech the largest dedicated property platform serving the UK’s innovation economy, and it has plans to create a £5 billion UK-wide portfolio that can support 2,600 high-growth businesses by 2032.
Rob Valentine, regional director at Bruntwood SciTech, said: “Birmingham is playing an increasingly vital role in the UK economy as an incubator for innovative businesses across the digital, tech and life science sectors. There is huge potential for further inward investment and growth here, and Enterprise Wharf is uniquely positioned to capitalise on that and support those businesses looking to drive this growth.
“We know that fast-growing tech firms thrive when located within supportive and like-minded clusters such as Innovation Birmingham, where they can access a wealth of specialist expertise, as well as academic expertise and highly skilled talent from Aston University.
“Birmingham and the wider West Midlands forms a key pillar of Bruntwood SciTech’s strategic focus and, with our new investment we will continue to provide and increase much-needed infrastructure and support for the growth of the science, tech and broader innovation sector.”
