Accelerating *new technologies* \\Martin Wood
Accelerate is Bryden Wood's programme for convening competitors. Bringing together companies from the same industries who rarely share a table, it creates a neutral space to examine shared challenges – from regulatory barriers to technology deployment – where collaboration is possible precisely because competition is left at the door. This video introduces the series and the thinking behind it.
Introducing Accelerate:
We are at a point in history when our failure to modernise, to transform our infrastructure, is itself a barrier. A barrier that inhibits decarbonisation, innovations in healthcare, transportation, communication, and industry.
In the UK and other developed economies, the construction of technological infrastructure has never been slower. The conversion cost of projects has never been higher. And the technologies that could address these challenges already exist. The problem is not invention. It is deployment.
In this film, Bryden Wood co-founder Martin Wood, Professor John Dyson, Technical Director Adrian La Porta, and colleagues set out the thinking behind Accelerate: a programme built on the conviction that closing the gap between research and realisation requires a different kind of space, and a different kind of conversation.
The gap that matters
At the critical interface between research and realisation, there is a gap. A cultural gap. A gap between finance and commerce, and science and industry – one that creates a barrier between the introduction of new technologies and a world that desperately needs them.
Most of the companies working on these technologies are doing so independently, competing for the same investment, solving the same problems in parallel. What is missing is a scalable process where sectors can multiply delivery rather than duplicate effort.
The Bryden Wood methodology
For 25 years, Bryden Wood has been working at the intersection of sectors: data centres, pharmaceuticals, energy, healthcare, cross-pollinating thinking and design ideas, and applying the disciplines of manufacturing to lower the entry threshold of new technologies.
The approach begins with project definition: going beyond the brief to understand the deeper intent, drawing together a wider group of stakeholders, and returning to that definition repeatedly to ensure what is being built actually meets the business objectives.
From there, the methodology moves to standardisation – finding components that can be shared across multiple projects, standardising and accelerating the design, manufacture, and assembly processes, and unlocking the speed, predictability, material efficiency, and spatial efficiency that manufacturing makes possible.
In practice, this means finding scalable, standardised ways to deploy small modular reactors to decarbonise the global grid. It means helping to deploy more efficient drug manufacturing technologies using road-transportable, standardised production systems. It means designing and constructing in a fundamentally more efficient way than the current model allows.
A space to think
In the heart of London's Knowledge Quarter – overlooking the British Library, the Crick Institute, and St Pancras Station – Bryden Wood's office at 101 Euston Road was designed for exactly this kind of work. A space to host the technologically curious, ambitious problem-solvers, and their commercial enablers. A space to grow and realise ideas, to collaborate, to be simultaneously challenging and like-minded. A space to solve complex problems with efficient and constructive solutions.
Accelerate is that space in programme form.
Watch the full film on YouTube.
