We’re nurturing place-based innovation to create “golden assets” in regions across the UK, helping to level up economic prosperity and create jobs of the future by building hubs for high-value manufacturing on the national and global stages.
At NETPark in County Durham, we’ve helped transform a brownfield site into a home for exciting new manufacturing industries. As an anchor tenant since 2008, we now host three National Centres on the site, offering laboratory, clean room, and manufacturing space.
We’ve collaborated with partners to deliver £72 million of R&D activities and enabled those businesses to secure over £283 million of follow-on private investment. We incubated 15 of these businesses — six of which have since moved into their own premises.
We also have a strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Durham University and Business Durham around our shared vision for NETPark. Business Durham has started construction on a 26-hectare expansion with the potential to support 1,250 new direct jobs and 2,200 supply chain jobs — a testament to NETPark’s success.
In addition, Darlington Central Park is home to our recently opened RNA Centre of Excellence and National Biologics Manufacturing Centre. We’re also next-door neighbours to our partner Teesside University’s National Horizon Centre, dedicated to training and research in health and biosciences.
By 2030, Darlington Central Park’s partners are aiming for the area to be a thriving 50,000 square metres of commercial scientific research and innovation space. Green areas, an ecological reserve, and a public square will complete the development, attracting players from the digital, biologics, and bio-pharmaceuticals sectors.
We’re involved in early discussions about Atom Valley — a large site 7 miles outside Manchester city centre. This ambitious project is poised to accelerate economic growth and industrial regeneration across Oldham, Bury and Rochdale by creating 1.6 million square metres of employment space, 20,000 jobs, and 7,000 new homes. We’re primed to help realise the innovation components of this development — contributing our experience and expertise to support the local vision.
CPI is also collaborating on the development of the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District Scotland (AMIDS). Building on the existing strengths of the Glasgow City Region and sitting next to Glasgow Airport, we opened our Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre there earlier this year, which sits alongside the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland, and established businesses such as Rolls Royce, Vascutek, and Thermo Fisher.
The UK has immense innovation potential, and we’re proud to be building on solid local foundations to maximise each region’s unique characteristics and individual strengths.
Sustainability is at the heart of what we do at CPI. Our whole business model is built around supporting our clients to create positive environmental, societal, and economic impact.
In 2022/23, we implemented a Sustainability Framework and Roadmap to help us achieve net zero by 2030. The Sustainability Framework aligns with CPI’s vision to enable a healthier and more sustainable future through deep tech innovation, whilst also incorporating 10 of the 17 UN Sustainability Development Goals.
The framework we developed is based on three fundamental pillars that set out our ambition to:
Support, empower and build thriving communities.
Commit to protecting the environment and reducing global warming to below 1.5°C.
Collaborate with our partners to develop innovative solutions that solve some of the key global challenges.
In the coming year, we’ll also seek to develop a programme of work to embed a culture of sustainability that will become as ingrained in our behaviours and actions as Health and Safety.
We recognise there will be challenges and the journey we’re on will have bumps along the way. For example, we know we must carefully balance our desire to reduce energy usage whilst also growing as an organisation. One way we’ll seek to mitigate this will be to adopt new tools and systems to better understand the resources used across our sites and obtain real-time data on our utility usage to take timely interventions.
Key to our plan is maximising the role a large organisation like CPI plays in supporting our local communities. This year we’ve supported the Middlesbrough Football Club Foundation. And in future, we’ll continue to fundraise for outreach programmes that support projects in lower socio-economic areas and support grassroots organisations that develop local people’s skills, opportunities and aspirations.
We’ll continue to work with our partners, government, and academia to solve some of the most pressing global challenges. Just one example of this kind of work is our project with Chestnut Bio to ensure that the millions of trees being planted to solve one problem, don’t create another issue by using plastic tree guards, which might pollute soil or get eaten by wildlife. Chestnut Bio’s innovative product means new trees can be planted with biodegradable tree guards that are much kinder to the environment.
We are setting out on an ambitious journey, but we know we only have one planet and as my favourite quote says, “The greatest threat to this planet is the belief that someone else will fix it.”
In CPI’s case, we want to be part of the solution.
My favourite part of the job is improving medicine production. The end user is a patient who will benefit from an improved medicine so knowing that what I’m doing is improving quality of life or even saving a life, is incredibly inspiring.
I’m currently working on projects that centre on food and feed; we’re looking at alternative proteins and alternatives to meats. We have a great vision for sustainable innovations that benefit people, places, and our planet, and these projects align with our mission.
CPI does some really exciting work, and our involvement in and response to the COVID-19 pandemic was particularly impressive.
As someone with Crohn’s disease, it was very exciting to see that CPI was working on a project to bring about transformational new treatments. It's absolutely amazing to think that the company I work for could actually end up changing my life.
Initially, it was the industry that attracted me to CPI but now it really goes so much further than that and it’s all about the real-world challenges that the CPI teams work on and the processes and techniques that will be used in our future world – that excites me every day!
