Paving the road ahead for growth

With the delivery of the third floor and its social area, the renovation of the Beijerinck Center has been completed at the beginning of August 2021. After several internal moves and welcoming a new resident, the building is almost fully let. It is time to take stock and to look ahead.

It all started when Fedde Sonnema accepted the job of Site Director DSM Delft in March 2018. He got the special assignment to not only manage the site for DSM, but also materialize the long standing wish to create a multi-tenant, vibrant, open innovation hub, called Biotech Campus Delft. Fedde drafted a plan for the abandoned Beijerinck Center, with central facilities on the ground floor for everybody on campus, and labs and offices in the rest of the building for young biotech companies. In September 2018, Cindy Gerhardt, then COO of the DSM Biotechnology Center, was appointed as Campus Development Director.

In 2019, DSM teamed up with four other parties: Municipality of Delft, Delft University of Technology, Province of South Holland and InnovationQuarter, to create an independent, non-profit foundation called Planet B.io. They agreed to fund Planet B.io for four years in order to renovate the Beijerinck Center, create an attractive environment for young biotech companies to settle at the campus and build an unique scale-up ecosystem focused on industrial biotechnology.

Today, October 2021, Planet B.io has already reached its 2024 goal to fully renovate the building and has attracted 13 interesting companies to join the community in the Beijerinck Center. So Fedde on behalf of DSM, and Cindy on behalf of Planet B.io, have gone back to the drawing table to make new plans for Planet B.io to further expand on the Biotech Campus Delft. With DSM’s recently announced focus to become a bioscience company active in food, feed and health, the Biotech Campus Delft is a more important and strategic home for DSM than ever. Both DSM and Planet B.io see a bright future for the campus as a vibrant, open, innovative working place for small, middle-sized, and large biotech companies. We can’t reveal any details yet, but beware that exciting plans for both DSM and Planet B.io are in the make…

Check out the video below to see the end result of the renovation of the Beijerinck Center: