HATCHlabs @Irvine Spectrum

Historically, 70% of all life science activity in the country has been focused in the top 3 clusters in the country - Boston, San Francisco and San Diego. However, There are numerous science clusters in the United States which have all the attributes of a well functioning node, but simply lack the physical space for early stage companies to continue growing in their home region.

The unfortunate result of this shortcoming is that academic institutions face losing their brightest and most promising innovators, municipalities miss out on the economic boosts these startup companies bring to the region, and the local workforce surrenders an opportunity to find high paying 21st century manufacturing jobs in their home town (The average annual wage for a life science worker in California is $95,252 according to Biocom). Also of significant note, nearly 65% of these high paying jobs were held by a workforce with education levels between a high school degree and an associates degree from a community college (2021 source: Biocom).

The Southern California region is a great example of this dilemma. Inclusive of the five primary counties which make up the region, Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, the region has long been a top national cluster for early stage life science innovation. As a region, Southern California receives roughly $1.6 billion in NIH grant funding and produces over $158.2 billion per year in economic impacts for the region (2021 source: IMPLAN). Despite these strengths, the greater Southern California region has lagged behind other top markets in delivering purpose-built life science lab facilities for early stage companies.

HATCHspaces ® has addressed this problem head on by delivering meticulously curated creative spaces for emerging companies within the life sciences and #STEAM disciplines. The company built their first purpose-built wet lab building in 2016 in the East Los Angeles Bioscience HUB and has now grown to be a part of the NexCore Science & Technology Team expanding into 9 buildings near life science anchors across 3 Southern California Counties.

Building upon the economic development efforts initiated by the city and county of Los Angeles and expanded across the other four counties making up the Southern California region, HATCHspaces utilized the principles of Entrepreneurial Planning to revitalize a vacant and unimproved warehouse building into a thriving center of life science activity and home to over 100 high paying jobs within the life sciences.