´óÏó´«Ã½

A discussion as to why the ´óÏó´«Ã½ needs to move departments to the North is beyond the scope of a blog post, so rather than going into that I'll focus on the impact of moving part of the R&D department to Manchester.

Not all of R&D is moving north; the planned building capacities mean there will be fewer engineers working in the North than the South. This means a department that is used to working out of a single location has to get used to working from dual sites located about 200 miles apart. We have been thinking about ways to ease this geographical split, for example we have a video link between our North and South bases that is used for everything from discussing work to catching up on gossip. Also, in our free time Matthew Shotton, an Industrial Trainee, and I have developed a robotic virtual telepresence which allows one site to drive an audio/video enabled robot around the other.

Moving R&D up from the South will move it closer to other ´óÏó´«Ã½ departments; Kingswood Warren (R&D's soon to be vacated base in the South) is around 20 miles from Television Centre. The 'North Lab' in Manchester (much like R&D's new home in West London) is physically much closer to the rest of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ than R&D ever has been. I hope this has the effect of raising the awareness of some of our research areas in the wider ´óÏó´«Ã½, and perhaps our work can inspire, and be inspired by content producers who may not know what goes on in the department.

At the ´óÏó´«Ã½ there is a big push towards building valuable relationships with external partners. The ethos behind the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in the North is to be more 'open'. This should mean it will be easy to work with other industrial and academic organisations. ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D has a strong history of collaborating with others and this tradition of Open Innovation is one we are keen to continue. For example, my current project which is researching the future of surround sound, has seen me in contact with in the Midlands, the and the to explore ares of common interest. The ability to work in partnership rather than in competition with external organisations should mean a lot more can be achieved. There is certainly no shortage of creative digital industries in the North which, along with the large number of Universities, offer a massive opportunity for partnerships.

A presence in the North is not entirely new to R&D. We have had a small number of engineers working from Manchester for 18 months or so, and when I started working on my first R&D placement here I found myself joining them, working in a small office in a corner of New Broadcasting House. This small office had worked in the past, but as more people were moving up and the work being done up here was becoming more diverse, R&D was outgrowing this modest space and needed an interim home, before the move to in 2012.

Rowan De Pomerai was given the job of co-ordinating the development a workspace suitable for the engineering team up here and for the movers planing on coming along before 2012. He talks more about it in his blog entry. Rowan did an excellent job of getting the space set-up and four weeks ago in the opposite corner of New Broadcasting House to the small office where I first started working for R&D, 'The North Lab' was opened by Peter Salmon (Director of ´óÏó´«Ã½ North) and Matthew Postgate (Controller of R&D). The building meets our current requirements and in the process of specification, design, implementation and actually moving, the whole team has learnt valuable lessons which can be applied to the larger scale move to Media City we face in two years.

As 2012 approaches R&D will be ramping up our advance team and with this flexible lab-space, we can be sure that the area where we work at Media City will allow the department to continue to offer the technical innovation it has been able to in the past.