A new giant is born with GoCo Health Innovation City

Within a few years, between 8,000 and 10,000 jobs will be created in the GoCo Health Innovation City.

Just like the BioVentureHub and the innovation environment there, GoCo Health Innovation City has been created on the initiative of AstraZeneca.

In the beginning there was a giant

It started with the pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca looking to sell some of their land connecting to their Gothenburg R&D site. The requirement to buy was that the new owner would continue to add value to the already emerging health ecosystem. Two actors were best suited, Next Step Group and Vectura Fastigheter. Both of which are real estate developers with extensive experience in future-proof urban development.

The real estate companies formed GoCo Health Innovation City, a joint venture in real estate development, back in 2017. Now, five years later, GoCo Health Innovation City is under development on the scale of an entire city district, comprising several hundred thousand square meters of real estate earmarked for Life Science companies.

Can host up to 10,000 workplaces

GoCo Health Innovation City is being built in phases, the first of which includes approximately 100,000 square meters of office and laboratory space. Almost everything is under construction in this phase and some facilities are already completed with tenants moved in, and additional tenants on the way in 2023.

The first house had a construction start in 2020 and was already completed in 2021. Fujirebio Diagnostics moved in as soon as it was ready for get-go. At the time of writing, approximately 70,000 square meters are under production within the first stage.

“The development is going much faster than we originally expected, and therefore we have already started looking at the next stage in GoCo’s real estate development”, says Anna Eckerstig, Director Real Estate Development at GoCo Health Innovation City.

In the next phase, an additional 110,000 square meters construction area is planned to be filled with innovative initiatives, laboratory space and new health-promoting initiatives.

When completed, GoCo Health Innovation City can host up to 10,000 workplaces.

Connecting with BioVentureHub

Companies from the BioVentureHub will start moving into GoCo Health Innovation City in the spring of 2023. These are companies that have developed their business over several years, grown both in terms of turnover and competence, and are now ready to step out of the nest that the innovation environment represents and test their own wings in the new environment that GoCo Health Innovation City offers.

Why is GoCo Health Innovation City the best development place for them?

“This is a great place to be as it is a part of an ecosystem that includes corporate ventures, incubators, the innovation environment BioVentureHub and then our creative development environment here at GoCo Health Innovation City. GoCo will have a lot of focus on openness and collaboration around innovations and research, as we know that companies that share their ideas and prioritise collaboration tend to grow more”, says Anna Eckerstig.

Gathering talents

GoCo Health Innovation City will be a completely newly built environment where everything will be adapted to the tenants’ needs. In other words, a very extensive environment with everything that Life Science companies could possibly need in the form of laboratory space, clean rooms, offices and meeting rooms and so on.

“In GoCo Health Innovation City, we will gather companies within health innovation that exist in the region, but also from the rest of Sweden and abroad”, Eckerstig adds.

Life Science is a global industry and the vast majority of companies have an international agenda. In many areas, the need for skills can be so specific that there is not a large enough recruitment base in Sweden, perhaps not even in the Nordic countries. Then the companies have to search for new talent globally. The next step will then be to convince talent to move here, whereupon attractive innovation environments become even more important.

By gathering many talents in one place, you attract more talents. AstraZeneca is a big talent magnet, and in collaboration with other industry leading companies located at GoCo Health Innovation City, it is possible to attract talent from all over the world.