Aurora House and the importance of good neighbours

We moved. From the 1^st September we are in Aurora House on the University of Highlands and Islands campus in Inverness.

Why should you care? Because we noticed a few lessons during that move that, we believe, apply to most start-ups, and especially to those product focused and with technical and engineering niche.

Good neighbours matter.

Not only because it is so much easier knowing there is someone to sign for your parcel (although this is also an advantage). We now share address with one other permanent tenant, who is also technically minded, and a few hot desking visitors. Each brand has its own small office, so we are able to focus on tasks at hand; we have a dedicated lab for testing and a separate maker space (here rapid prototyping, assembly and testing takes place), a common room, a very well equipped boardroom and a cosy kitchen. Each space has its purpose. We can meet and exchange ideas, catch up and then return to our respective dens to work on our projects.

We have a space to share and a space to keep ourselves to ourselves. It is a nice balance.
The fact that our closes neighbour is a technically minded brand matters as well. Their speciality is quite different to ours, they are focused on harvesting energy whereas we are adamant on increasing safety of complex, reusable surgical instruments via improving decontamination technologies. However, we understand each others specialisations, need for quick modelling to test our solutions, we share equipment and sometimes even lab space. This understanding of our mutual technologies makes us more than neighbours, it makes us colleagues. And the fact that we do not do the same thing also motivates us to practise our pitches as we have someone to introduce our new ideas to.
We are enjoying this new setup and fully recommend it.

Being on a university campus is another reminder of the importance of constant learning – smart learning, finding solutions from various disciplines. We are good at what we do because we have that multiplicity of backgrounds and we can draw from fluid dynamics, mechanics, mechatronics, programming, physics, biochemistry and even sociology (as a product based company we remember about the user experience).

So yes, good neighbours matter. They motivate us to get even better.

P.S. We are now in Aurora House, 8 Inverness Campus, Beechwood Cottages, Inverness IV2 5NB. It is a fantastic space for business and ideas to grow.

Come and visit us!