Leader: South-eastern promise

Consumer products giant LG’s new super laboratory on the edge of South Korean capital Seoul has to be seen to be believed.

Occupying a site roughly the same size as University College London’s Bloomsbury campus, LG’s science park includes 20 buildings occupied by 18,000 researchers and support staff. A second phase of the scheme will add another six buildings and take the number of workers up to 25,000 by 2022.

Remarkably, there isn’t any product design taking place here. Instead, this army of researchers is working on cutting-edge science, the building blocks of the products manufactured by LG. This marks it out from many Western manufacturers, which design products using other people’s components. Take the iPhone as an example. Apple’s biggest money-maker uses displays manufactured by LG and Samsung, another South Korean industrial behemoth.

Asia is rapidly overtaking the west when it comes to innovation. The US, the EU and the UK have negative or zero growth in patenting new ideas and are outperformed by China and South Korea, with high patent growth in Singapore and India

LG has invested £2.7bn in its science park with the idea that this will give it a competitive edge in new technologies including artificial intelligence and existing ones such as software and communications.

It hopes to achieve this by converging science with technology research on the new campus. This is specifically designed to foster interaction between different disciplines in the hope it will spark innovative ideas, an approach known as “collaborative science”.

The approach is likely to pay off. A recent report by the Center for Advancing Innovation and PatSnap suggests that Asia is rapidly overtaking the West when it comes to innovation. The US, the EU and the UK have negative or zero growth in patenting new ideas and are outperformed by China and South Korea, with high patent growth in Singapore and India.  

There is some good news, though: while the UK can’t compete in the product innovation game, it can benefit from growth elsewhere, in places such as Singapore and South Korea. For the UK the most significant fact about LG’s super laboratory is that it was designed by architect HOK, largely out of its London office.

HOK has developed specialist expertise in designing sophisticated laboratories that are adaptable and promote collaborative science. It’s already done this in the UK: the £650m Francis Crick Institute in London’s St Pancras, which was completed in 2016, brings together six research institutions under one roof. This would have given LG the confidence to trust HOK with the design of such an important element in its growth strategy. And it seems that HOK is already talking to another client in South Korea about more work, presumably on the back of such a high-profile project.

Architecture is already a valuable export for some architectural firms, including Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid, which are in demand internationally. Smaller firms are also getting in on the action: Heatherwick Studio recently won the job to build one of the world’s largest air terminals at Singapore’s Changi airport. The practice teamed up with the might of US architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox to win the job. This type of partnership is key to success. At LG, HOK teamed up with local architect Gansam, which had a longstanding relationship with LG, and brought valuable local knowledge and an on-the-spot presence to the project.

There are other areas where the UK has world-leading experience ripe for export. This won’t be the grunt of contracting – most South-east Asian economies have well-developed construction sectors but specialised expertise.

A good example is BIM: not so much the software, but the ability to successfully embed the collaborative working practices and information management techniques needed to successfully leverage the technology. The UK is experienced at doing this at the sort of scale likely to be appreciated by South-east Asian economies. BIM was first used at scale on Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in the early noughties and has been further refined, playing a critical role in the delivery of Crossrail. This has been helped enormously by the government’s decision to mandate BIM on public sector projects and support for developing common tools and protocols to make BIM adoption easier.

These types of exports are likely to become more valuable now that the chances of a successful Brexit seem remote. The IMF recently downgraded UK growth prospects from 1.6% in 2018 to 1.4% because of Brexit uncertainty, while growth is holding up in Asia. Given this background, perhaps we should be investing in a dedicated innovation laboratory designed to develop and bring out the best in UK construction.