Work has started to extend a facility at Nova University College Dublin (UCD).

The €6.5 million development project is taking place in the east courtyard and is expected to be completed in 12 months.

NovaUCD, based on UCD's Belfield campus, officially opened in October 2003 and is currently home to over 25 start-up companies. The companies have either spun-out of UCD research programmes or have spun-in to locate at NovaUCD in order to collaborate with the University.

Tom Flanagan, UCD’s Director of Enterprise and Commercialisation said: "The NovaUCD facility has been running at full capacity for several years now. There is an ongoing and significant demand from ambitious entrepreneurs who want to locate their start-ups at NovaUCD to leverage our ecosystem of experienced mentors, founders, alumni, investors and sponsors who can help them grow their businesses globally. By joining the NovaUCD community these start-ups can also take advantage of access to our world-class researchers, facilities and talent across the UCD campus.

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"The development of the east courtyard will enable us to increase our capacity by over 50% and when completed NovaUCD will be able to accommodate up to 450 people."

The newly developed courtyard will result in 800m2 of additional licensable space, and will include a total of 23 business units, labs and co-working space.

The internal courtyard area will be designed as a new meeting and social space for client companies.