Renishaw Opens New Innovation Center

Renishaw plc (Gloucestershire, England) recently marked a major milestone in its growth with the opening of its new 153,000 sq ft Innovation Centre in the UK. The $31 million facility, located at company headquarters near Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, was formally opened in early July by Her Royal Highness, The Princess Royal.

The Innovation Centre gives the company additional space to house research and development and corporate services staff, as well as demonstration, training and conference facilities. The additional space also enables the spectroscopy and laser calibration product lines to relocate to the company headquarters site. This first phase of the development includes planning permission to expand by another 77,000 sq ft. The company’s investment program also includes the opening of a new R&D operation within the faculty of electrical engineering at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, as well as other new construction in the UK.

At the opening event for the Innovation Centre, Sir David McMurtry, the chairman and chief executive of Renishaw, said, “This is one of a series of significant investments that we are making to secure our growth in the UK and our many overseas markets. I would like to thank all of our employees and our contractors who have worked incredibly hard to deliver such a high quality facility.”

As part of the celebration for the new Innovation Centre Her Royal Highness, The Princess Royal, presented the company with its 18th Queen’s Award, this one for Enterprise in the Innovation category. Then-Princess Anne last visited Renishaw in 1980 when the company had just one facility and employed around 100 people, a vast difference from today, when the business has more than 4,000 employees in the UK and wholly-owned subsidiary operations in 31 countries.

Inside the Innovation Centre, all 40 meeting rooms are named after British innovators, primarily in the fields of science and engineering, but also innovators local to company’s headquarters site, such as Tyndale, Jenner and Pitman. The main conferencing facility is named after UK engineering icon Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was responsible for many well known structures in the West of England region including the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the ss Great Britain.

Other rooms are dedicated to significant innovators, including Whittle, Faraday, Lovelace, Haslett, Babbage, Turing, Caxton and Stephenson. “This excellent new building is a place we hope will inspire people, and while it is very much focused on the future, we are also keen to honor those British innovators who have helped us as a society get to where we are today,” explained McMurtry.

The company received its Queen’s Award for the development and manufacture of its RESOLUTE™ family of non-contact, optical position feedback devices that enable a leap in performance for motion control systems used in manufacturing and other environments. Suitable for the most demanding applications, RESOLUTE is the world’s first single track fine-pitch optical absolute encoder.

It can determine position to a resolution of one nanometer (one billionth of a meter) with motion speeds of up to 100 meters per second for linear position applications, and is capable of 32-bit resolution at up to 36,000 rpm for rotary (angle) applications. RESOLUTE is used in diverse applications, such as safety-critical position feedback for medical robots, the control of precision metalworking machines, the manufacture of flat panel displays and the production of semiconductors.

“This is a phenomenal product that marries our years of experience and expertise in areas such as optics, high speed image processing, system engineering and precision manufacturing,” noted McMurtry. “I am proud of the achievements of the many people across the Renishaw Group who have worked tirelessly to produce a globally successful encoder product that is a world-first in its field.”

In 1980, Renishaw had:

• just over 100 employees
• annual sales of $3.1 million
• all of its employees based at one site
• no overseas operations
• just recruited its first apprentice (1979)
• just won its second Queen’s Award

Today, the company:

• has over 4,000 employees
• is forecasting annual sales for the year ended June 2015 of between $753 milliion and $800 million
• has 15 offices in the UK and an additional 56 offices in 31 countries, including 12 offices in China
• has 114 apprentices in training and this year will also recruit a record 70 young graduates

www.renishaw.com