Recently we hosted a lunchtime webinar on a topic close to our hearts here at Engine Shed: innovation at the new Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus. With 90 people registered, we brought together four colleagues from the University of Bristol to share updates on their different areas of work – all of which will be represented in the new Sloane Robinson building, just over the railway tracks from where I’m sitting.
It felt like a fitting conversation to be having. As we focus on the closure activity here at Engine Shed, our attention is increasingly turning to what’s coming next. The hope is that this new building becomes a genuine gateway: for industry, for SMEs, and for many more organisations to engage with the university in the months and years ahead. As I said at the start, you might be here because you’re interested in office space, lab space or event space – or maybe it’s not about space at all, and it’s really about connections, information, or wanting to collaborate. All of that was on the table.
Here’s a full run-through of what was covered.
Marty Reid: an introduction to Bristol Innovations and the campus
Marty Reid, the university’s Director of Innovation, opened by introducing Bristol Innovations – the team looking after this part of the enterprise campus, and the university’s face for working between industry and the talent emerging from its research.
Bristol Innovations describes itself as the university’s catalyst for innovation, working across three strands:
- Industrial partnership – working with SMEs, large corporates and public sector organisations to access research and talent, and to support the adoption of frontier technologies. Marty pointed to areas where Bristol and the region are genuinely nationally strong including AI as the standout example, where the university hosts Isambard AI, the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, alongside a dense cluster of research talent.
- Spin-outs and Commercialisation – supporting entrepreneurial researchers who want to create spin-out companies or license their technology. Marty made the case that spin-outs, once a niche concern, are now a serious economic force: nationally they dominate among the twenty largest startups in several of the UK government’s key growth sectors, including pharma, biotech and semiconductors, with a combined enterprise value cited in government strategy as over $100 billion. Bristol is a genuine player in this landscape coming 6th in Europe and 4th in the UK by enterprise value created from research, ahead of Imperial, and punching well above its weight given the university and city’s size. He gave three examples to bring this to life: PureSpring (gene therapy for kidney disease, $100m raised), Phasecraft (quantum computing software, $30m raised this year, offices in Bristol, London and the US), and The Global Talent Fund (a social venture supporting underrepresented talent into education, £40m secured in donated funding this year).
- Deep tech support, training and incubation, largely delivered through the SETsquared brand – including flexible workspace programmes helping science and technology companies address barriers to growth.
Marty was clear that Bristol’s success here rests on a genuinely thriving ecosystem – a long-term focus on entrepreneurial culture, supportive infrastructure from Future Space, Science Creates and SETsquared, and a venture capital culture that already puts Bristol ahead of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester for attracting deep tech VC. The next step, he said, is connecting that success story to global industry and scaling it up, which is exactly what the Temple Quarter campus and the Sloane Robinson building are for.
On the building itself: it sits within a wider regional regeneration project, backed by significant West of England Combined Authority funding, and is positioned right in the middle of the city’s “West Innovation Arc” connecting to aerospace and advanced manufacturing at Filton, the National Composite Centre, and UWE’s innovation centre. Inside, the vision is about closing the gap between industry and research talent – with doctoral training centres in AI, cybersecurity and quantum co-located alongside the business school (home to the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, ranked the world’s #2 entrepreneurship course, second only to Purdue) and a community of 4,000 students, researchers and staff, all sitting alongside the Bristol Innovation Zone at the heart of the building.
Practically speaking: research groups are already moving in this week, with the building opening for industry and partners from September. The ground floor – including the huge atrium and yellow staircase, will be fully publicly accessible via a new entrance directly from Temple Meads, just a two-minute walk from Platform 15. The Innovation Zone itself is designed as a landing spot for industry at every stage, from startups through to scale-ups and corporate R&D teams, with commercial workspace, labs and equipment, including dry labs suited to areas like quantum and semiconductors.
Jack Stanbury: the business school in the new building
Jack Stanbury, gave an overview of the Business School, which will be based on floor five alongside its research capability, leadership team and teaching activity – including the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CfIE), which is now formally part of the business school.
Ways the business school will engage with industry include:
- Research strengths spanning the interaction between technology and society, innovation, strategy, supply chains, sustainability, and core business topics like corporate finance and accounting.
- Formal engagement mechanisms – industry partnerships, fellowships and “professors in practice” (bringing in people currently working in industry), academic secondments into industry, and a university-wide consultancy offer for targeted support from specific academics.
- New labs, launching alongside the move – starting with a Food Systems Laboratory, the first of four planned labs, designed to be interdisciplinary across the university and across sectors, with organisations invited to join advisory boards and collaborate on future funding bids.
- A Mergers and Acquisitions Observatory, led by Professor Florian Bauer, translating global observation of M&A practice back into industry.
- A newly launched Advanced Manufacturing Observatory, in partnership with TAG.
- An executive education programme, led by Professor Graham Abbey, offering online MSc programmes in management and leadership alongside bespoke, employer-led training.
- A new convening space, the Centre for Purposeful Leadership, bringing regional and national leaders together to discuss shared challenges and feed that learning back into leadership training.
Jack will be based in the new building and welcomes direct contact, alongside a general business school enquiries mailbox.
Georgina Webb-Dicken: public realm and event spaces
Georgina Webb-Dicken walked through the building’s public and bookable spaces:
- The Exchange Hall – the main entrance, over 1,000 square metres, reached by crossing the newly landscaped University Square from the new Temple Meads entrance at Platform 15. It includes a staffed welcome desk and digital signage, with capacity for pop-ups.
- Source Café and Bar, the university’s in-house catering, offering hot lunches, sandwiches, pastries and coffee – open to the public, including passing train travellers.
- A food court on the first floor, also run by Source, with a deliberately global menu reflecting the building’s large international student population, and a strong focus on minimising waste.
- A south-facing terrace leading off the food court, accessible separately from University Square, bookable as an event space with its own gated area.
- The Bill Brown Forum – a circular lecture theatre seating 314, unique in the UK, designed for a more engaged, in-the-round style of presenting, with breakout seating and standing space at the back. A striking option for conferences and events.
- 22 active learning studios of varying sizes (three at 120-person capacity, plus 90, 60 and 30-person rooms), bookable outside teaching hours, with fully flexible, reconfigurable furniture.
- An executive suite on the fifth floor, with two boardrooms (14 and 30 person capacity), hybrid meeting facilities, river views over Glass Wharf, and an adjoining lobby for catering.
Fiona Hyland: Bristol Rooms and civic space
Fiona Hyland, Assistant Director for Civic Spaces, closed the presentations with an introduction to Bristol Rooms which is part of a wider network of civic spaces that already includes the Barton Hill micro campus (nearly six years old) and the more recent Hartcliffe and Withywood micro campus.
Bristol Rooms sits on the ground floor and is fully publicly accessible – no membership required. It’s designed to support the “quadruple helix” of innovation: bringing together business and industry, the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector, the public sector, and education, around shared societal challenges. A starter set of projects will run themed lounges regularly, with the space itself deliberately left open to evolve once people start using it – Fiona explained that they want to “let the garden grow a bit” before deciding exactly what it becomes. It holds around 100 people for a mingle-style event, with a kitchen, some hot desking and café space, a large screen, and movable circular seating. Ad hoc events can be planned on Wednesdays.
There’s also a smaller circular space for around 25 people (or more as a mingle), which will incorporate public art still to be installed – Fiona teased us with scant detail about the coming public art piece that will make the space feel even more like home.
The university is holding a public open day on Saturday 10 October, which also marks 150 years since the institution’s founding as a university college. Details of this and events planned in Bristol Rooms, will appear on the university’s events webpage.
Questions from the floor
The final part of the session was open Q&A. A few themes came up repeatedly:
Access to co-working and desks. Beyond the bookable rooms, the public realm includes comfy seating, laptop lounges and informal desk banks similar to co-working spaces elsewhere in the city. Bristol Innovations membership unlocks a more private business lounge (in the spirit of the Engine Shed model) and hot desking on the fourth floor for an additional fee. Anyone interested in a desk was encouraged to get in touch directly – Marty noted the team running the space is the same team that has successfully run Engine Shed, bolstered with extra resource for the move.
Eligibility for the Innovation Zone. As a condition of WECA funding, companies based in the workspaces and Innovation Zone need to be in some way connected to growing the regional deep tech economy – though, as Marty clarified, they don’t need to be a science or tech company themselves. Anyone unsure whether they’d qualify was encouraged to simply ask.
What counts as “deep tech.” Asked to define it, Marty described a broad definition: companies emerging from genuine research into protectable IP, whether or not that’s a university spin-out – it could come from a company, from hardware development, or from technology developed elsewhere.
Is this too university-focused? This was the most substantive challenge of the session. A question was raised about whether the deep tech definition risks excluding genuinely innovative startups that don’t fit a narrow mould, and whether the university’s role should be about convening the wider innovation community rather than only companies working directly with it. Marty was direct in his response: the SETsquared Bristol Accelerator has never been exclusively for spin-outs and will continue to focus on broad regional science and technology startups; the university works in active collaboration with (not competition against) Science Creates and Future Space, including a joint presentation at Science Creates’ new OMX incubator only a couple of weeks ago; and many of the organisations expected to move into the Innovation Zone are established companies establishing an R&D presence in the region for the first time. On the WECA-backed focus specifically, he was candid that the ambition is to grow a niche that could scale significantly, without displacing the city’s existing flexible workspace and incubator network – and that the Innovation Zone is only around 10% of the building, with the business school and the wide range of other research groups in the building not bound by that focus at all.
Other questions covered practical points: the building has been designed to a high BREEAM sustainability standard (and, reassuringly, has effective air conditioning); a U-Card is a University of Bristol staff ID card, and we have clarified that U-Cards are not available for Alumni at this time (but they can apply for a Graduate Borrower Card from the library to have access to those spaces in Clifton).
What else is included in the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus? There are lots of other University related buildings and projects on the campus, they include The Sheds (for Creative Industries colleagues), The Dental School, OMX, Science Creates, Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and many more. You can find out more here: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/temple-quarter-enterprise-campus/about-temple-quarter-enterprise-campus/
Get in touch
For questions specific to the Bristol Innovation Zone and Bristol Innovations, the best contact is bristol-innovations-zone@bristol.ac.uk. For business school enquiries, contact the general business school enquiries mailbox (business-school-enquiries@bristol.ac.uk). For event space, enquiries check this page for more information. And for specific queries about the Bristol Rooms offer contact civic-spaces@bristol.ac.uk.
Thank you to everyone who joined, asked questions, and helped make this such a useful session.
The recording is available here until 20/8/26
Follow Bristol Innovations on LinkedIn.
Briony P