Bristol-Myers Squibb ($BMY) is gearing up to build a 2,500-employee campus in New Jersey, following the biopharma trend of ditching far-flung outposts in favor of collaboration-encouraging hubs.
The new space, in Lawrenceville, will be a 650,000-square-foot complex, expected to open its doors by the end of 2016, the company said. Bristol-Myers' new shop will consolidate two existing offices in nearby Plainsboro and West Windsor, according to the company, bringing those employees under one roof with added room to grow.
Bristol-Myers touts its new space as part of an over-arching plan to modernize its workplaces and better encourage the free flow of ideas. The plan is to encourage nimble collaboration by removing the walls between employees, literally through its design and figuratively via widespread videoconferencing, the company said.
"Our new campus will create a dynamic and modern workplace to advance the important work that our employees are doing to discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines for patients with serious diseases," CEO Lamberto Andreotti said.
Bristol-Myers' move dovetails with a trend among the world's largest drugmakers, who are moving toward the hub model, both in R&D and administrative functions. AstraZeneca ($AZN) is the most recent to adopt the strategy, plotting to pool most of its research operation in a single Cambridge, U.K., campus, mirroring similar efforts from Pfizer ($PFE), Roche ($RHHBY), Merck KGaA and others.
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