Sneak peek: Lincoln’s Boole Technology Centre to be completed ahead of schedule

The new £6.8 million commercial business building on Lincoln’s Science and Innovation Park will be completed two months ahead of schedule.

Final touches are being added to the Boole Technology Centre off Beevor Street, and tenants should be able to start fitting out their new laboratories and offices from the start of February 2017.

Partly funded by the Greater Lincolnshire LEP, through the government’s Growth Deal Programme, the building sits at the core of the science park’s mission to enhance the county’s economy by stimulating further business growth and innovation.

Director Tom Blount said: “We’re running about two months ahead of schedule at the moment. For all intents and purposes the building will be completed before Christmas.

“We’re expecting to receive the building in the first half of January. We would like to have a couple of weeks just running the building making sure we understand how it works, making sure that the tenant experience is going to be absolutely right.”

Tom Blount, Director of the Lincoln Science and Innovation Park invited The Lincolnite on an exclusive first tour of the nearly completed building. Photo: Steve Smailes for The Lincolnite

Out of the 22 available state-of-the-art office and laboratory spaces, five have already been let out with a few more businesses currently in discussions.

Once fully let the building is expecting to directly create or secure 53 jobs.

Founded by Lincolnshire Co-op and the University of Lincoln in 2012, the 2,398 sqm centre is the first building on the science park to be purpose built for technology businesses.

“One of the things that differentiates us from a business partner is that we have a gateway policy. We’re really heavily focused, not necessarily on the sectors of the companies that come in, but on the intensity of the research and things that they do.

“We want companies that are highly innovative to be located with, not only with the university but also with their peers. That’s something that we feel has been really tough to find in Lincolnshire in the past.”

Joining around 100 science parks in the UK, Tom hopes that the science park will be seen similar to the ones in Warwick and Southampton.

“Part of the purpose for this is to create a home for technology businesses so we have a real intensity of that technical skill and knowledge of innovation so we can reach out across supply chains across the county and improve a lot of those businesses, making them more competitive.

“It doesn’t just create a lot of jobs here, it also safeguards jobs in supply chains all over our patch and that’s really what we want to do.”