I find genuinely difficult to describe to people who have not experienced it that the feeling that the space itself is a participant in the work.

The layout matters. The airflow matters. The distance between the lab bench and the storage area, the quality of the flooring, the placement of the ventilation all of it shapes whether the science happens well or barely at all. A researcher who has to walk 200 metres for a reagent, or work in a space where the temperature fluctuates unpredictably, is a researcher spending cognitive energy on friction rather than on thinking.

I did not fully understand this until I was responsible for building spaces where research actually happens. And it has permanently changed how I think about what developers owe to the future of science.

There is a persistent belief in the construction industry that a building is a container. The activity shapes the building during design, but once the building is handed over, it is inert. 

This is wrong. 

Buildings are active participants in the work they house. A hospital designed with poor wayfinding creates clinical errors. A school with inadequate acoustics produces measurably worse learning outcomes. And a research facility designed without genuine understanding of how science moves or how ideas travel between disciplines, how informal conversation generates hypotheses, how physical proximity between people working on adjacent problems accelerates discovery; produces slower, more siloed, more expensive science.

Lab and R&D real estate demand has grown from 38 million sq ft in 2019 to over 90 million sq ft in 2026. Innovation office and flexible research space are the category that captures co-working environments designed specifically for knowledge-intensive industries and has more than tripled over the same period. This is not simply the biotech sector growing. It is the biotech, pharmaceutical, materials science, and deep tech sectors collectively demanding a different kind of built environment to grow into.

What Research Spaces Need

The first is inflexibility. 

Research changes faster than any building can be redesigned. A lab set up for one assay format can become obsolete within three years as the science moves. The buildings that serve researchers well are the ones designed with deliberate adaptability, modular infrastructure, raised flooring for easy service reconfiguration, partition systems that can be reorganised without structural intervention.

The second is the separation of formal and informal space. 

The most important conversations in any research environment do not happen in seminars. They happen at the coffee point, in the corridor between two labs, in the shared equipment room while two researchers from different teams happen to be waiting for the same centrifuge. Spaces that treat these moments as accidents rather than designing for them deliberately are wasting their most valuable resource.

The third is the disconnection between research and living. 

This is where my two businesses converge most sharply. The researcher who spends 90 minutes commuting in each direction, who cannot find decent housing within a reasonable distance of the facility, who has no access to quality food, childcare, or green space near work that researcher is not bringing their full capacity to the bench. The facility is paying for talent it is not fully accessing.

Why Mumbai MMR Is The Emerging Story

Hyderabad and Bengaluru have had a decade’s head start on R&D real estate. Genome Valley, Pharmacity, Electronic City, Whitefield; these are established clusters with mature support ecosystems. The Mumbai MMR’s R&D space absorption has been catching up fast, roughly tripling between 2021 and 2026, but it remains significantly behind on a per-capita basis relative to the concentration of pharmaceutical and biotech companies headquartered here.

That gap is an opportunity, not a failure. What Hyderabad and Bengaluru built over a decade, the MMR corridor including the MIDC expansions along the Raigad and Palghar axes can build with the benefit of observing what worked and what did not. The integrated development model, where research campuses are designed in proximity to quality residential and mixed-use environments, does not need to be discovered through trial and error here. 

When TerraPHA established its manufacturing and research base, we were not simply choosing an industrial zone. We were betting on a corridor that is in the early stages of the same transition that Genome Valley underwent 15 years ago. The infrastructure is arriving with road, rail, utilities. The land is still priced at levels that allow genuine investment in quality rather than just in square footage. The window to build it right is open now, and it will not stay open indefinitely.

What I Would Build Differently If I Were Starting Today

Both at TerraPHA and at Techton, I have learned that the most expensive mistakes in any built environment are the ones made during design, the decisions that look small at the drawing stage and become structural constraints for the next 30 years.

For research and innovation spaces specifically, I would build for the unexpected collaboration first. I would design the informal zones before I designed the formal labs. I would put the quality food, the open green space, and the quiet room at the centre of the building plan; not at the edges, not as afterthoughts and let the labs organise around them.

And I would build close to where people want to live, not just close to where the industrial zoning happens to allow it. The most effective research cluster in the world is useless if the people doing the research cannot sustain a life near it.

That is the building science has always deserved. It is what more developers need to take seriously, and what the science and the scientists will increasingly demand.