Apple is opening its first office in Cambridge, England, close to the city’s world-famous university, according to a report in Business Weekly.
The Californian-based business is believed to have identified 90 Hills Road for its Cambridge city centre offices and R & D function. With Grade A office space at a premium in Cambridge, the US giant would probably start with around 20 staff but have capacity to gear up to as many as 40 in that space.
The offices overlook the Cambridge University botanical gardens …
Cambridge is one of the cities the UK government is attempting to establish as a UK Silicon Valley, with more than 1,000 hi-tech companies established in the area known as the Cambridge Cluster or Silicon Fen. The appeal for Apple is likely to be the close links between local technology companies and the academic research expertise available through Cambridge University. Cambridge graduates have notched-up an impressive 61 Nobel Prizes between them.
The university has also established a School of Technology designed to pull together the work of six separate departments: chemical engineering and biotechnology, computing, engineering, business and sustainability leadership.
Apple has traditionally favored a centralized approach, with almost all its corporate work conducted in Cupertino, where it is building its famous spaceship campus. The company has, though, recently begun to establish a number of satellite offices around the world, including Seattle and Florida within the U.S. and both Israel and China internationally.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Let’s hope that Apple turns this into a trend! Partnering with academia, bright new minds, bright new ideas… this sounds like one of Apple’s greatest ideas! And Cambridge isn’t a bad place to start. How about some other famous brain banks? This is exciting news!
Gee Apple what is wrong with Berkeley, Caltech , Stanford of if you want to get out of your backyard why not MIT?????????
Give them a chance.
Regarding MIT, I believe that Apple used to have a research campus in Cambridge, Mass., created when they purchased Coral software, but Steve Jobs shut it down along with all of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.
However Apple did open an office in Kendall Square’s Cambridge Innovation Center in 2013, so who knows what they are doing now…
Actually I may be wrong about Steve Jobs killing Apple Cambridge – from Mike Lockwood’s post it looks like they were actually shut down in 1995, before Steve Jobs’ return.
School, coming 2020.
“Cambridge undergraduates have notched-up an impressive 61 Nobel Prizes between them.”
Impressive! Most people don’t get their Nobel prizes until they’re at least in graduate school !! ;-)