Barclays Eagle Labs lands at Discovery Park in Kent

In the Kentish countryside not far from Sandwich is Discovery Park, lies a 20-acre science and technology park, one of only seven Life Science Opportunity Zones in the UK.  

This summer Barclays Eagle Labs announced it would be setting up shop at the park, connecting it to one of the largest co-working and incubator networks for start-ups and scale-ups in the UK.   

We caught up with Jane Kennedy, Chief Business Officer at Discovery Park, to find out more about what the Barclays Eagle Lab will bring.  

Jane explained how Kent’s peripheral location led them to approach Barclays:  

“We entered into discussions with Barclays Eagle Labs because we saw the strength of the network that they are building. They currently have twenty-seven physical locations, with six more in the pipeline. Being fairly on the periphery of the country, tapping into Barclays and the network they have brings a huge amount of connectivity.  

“When I first came down, I was standing at the train station in St Pancras, and as you look out one door you can see the Francis Crick institute, and then you look out the other door and see Google and Yahoo. Then you jump on the train and an hour and 15 minutes later you’re in the heart of a biotech cluster in one of the UK’s biggest science parks.   

“That opportunity to create a knowledge exchange corridor between the Life Sciences and technology cluster we’ve got at Discovery Park and the knowledge exchange quarter in St Pancras is phenomenal.”  

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Jane also detailed the role Barclays Eagle Labs will play in the day-to-day operation of the park and what Eagle Labs offers the companies located there:  

She said: “They’ll have a physical base at the park, and we’ll have an ecosystem manager working out of that office to create co-working spaces where companies can come in and hot desk or use it as a springboard to test out Discovery Park to see if they like it before taking office space.” 

People will be able to access Eagle Lab resources at Discovery Park and also online with the Kent facility plugging into a wider national network. 

“A lot of the programmes they run are online, even more so because of Covid. The main thing for us was building the network through Barclays so companies can come in and look at Discovery Park, where they can find collaborative partners and opportunities to work on projects in different sectors with Eagle Labs’ network of companies.   

“They work with around 700 health tech companies UK-wide. So, it will be a physical space; it’s a virtual online community but the individuals within Barclays, such as the ecosystem managers and the leads of each of the tech verticals – HealthTech, EnergyTech and AgriTech – are very active. We also like to look at how they can bridge corporates and start-ups, so that start-ups can talk directly to potential customers or acquirers and, equally, corporates are able to access innovation in a way they wouldn’t be able to ordinarily.” 

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Featured image caption: The Discovery Park Eagle Lab will collaborate with other UK venues

This article first appeared in our newly relaunched print magazine, which you can read here.