The hardest first step

Ask a science founder what slowed them down in year one. Lab space comes up more often than you'd think. The science might be ready. The funding might be in the bank. But a company can't run a single experiment until it has a lab, the right services, somewhere to store samples and somewhere for the team to work. Building that from scratch takes capital, time and expertise that most early-stage companies would rather spend on research.

That is the problem First-Step by journey was built to solve. As the year comes to a close, it's one of the projects we're proudest of, and we've made a short film about it. Watch it here. This piece is about why buildings like it matter, and what it takes to get them right.

Why shared lab space works

A multi-tenant lab building changes the maths for a young company. Instead of fitting out a whole lab, it takes the space it needs today, fully fitted to CL2, and moves in. When the team grows, it takes more. An equipment room means tenants aren't each buying the same expensive kit. A café and breakout space mean a five-person start-up has somewhere exciting to meet.

Those shared spaces also do something harder to measure. They put scientists from different companies in the same room. Ideas travel, collaborations start, people find the supplier or the hire they've been looking for. In Cambridge, where so much of the UK's life sciences growth begins as a spin-out, that sense of community is part of what makes a building worth moving into. Scientists expect the same quality of workplace as anyone else. Science is also one of the few jobs you can't do from home. A lab building has to be somewhere people want to come every day.

Designing for people you haven't met

Most lab projects start with a client who can tell you exactly what their science needs. A multi-tenant building doesn't have that luxury. It has to work for companies that haven't signed a lease yet, doing science nobody has described. That changes the design problem. Units need to work at different sizes and combine as tenants grow. Services have to be planned with enough capacity and flexibility for a range of uses, not one. Labs need write-up space close by, so researchers can move from bench to desk without crossing the building. And every lab has to meet CL2, because tenants arrive ready to work.

Getting the early decisions right

That's why so much of our work happens before anyone is on site. We work in three stages. Discover, where we get to know the people, the science and the building. Shape, where design and budget develop together, so cost is never a surprise. And Create, where one team takes the project from site to handover. Architecture, engineering and construction sit in the same conversation from the first meeting to the last snag.

Steve Thompson, our Pre-construction Principal, says: "The biggest risk on most projects is not a design risk, construction risk, or cost risk. It's a decision-making risk."

On a building like First-Step, those decisions are everywhere. How big the units should be. Where the shared spaces sit. How much capacity the services need for science that hasn't arrived yet. Settle them early, with everyone in the room, and construction becomes a matter of delivering a plan rather than solving problems on the fly. You can see the result in the film. The labs, the café and the equipment room feel like they belong together, because they were planned together.

A thank you to end the year

No building like this is the work of one person. Thank you to our site team, who turned a building behind hoardings into somewhere science can happen. Thank you to our preconstruction and design teams, whose early decisions are in every room. And thank you to journey, for trusting us with a building that will be the first step for so many companies.

If you haven't seen it yet, watch the film to see First-Step come together, from scaffolding to science. Or read the full case study here. And if you're planning your own first step, or your next one, we'd love to hear about it.

Inuti is a global design and engineering firm delivering advanced facilities for science, with over 60 years of experience and 712,000+ sq ft delivered. We work with a range of sectors at every stage of growth, across the UK and beyond.

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