BUILDING work will start next month on the country's first Technical Innovation Centre. The North West Development Agency has approved plans to build the £2.3 million centre on diocesan land next to Mount St Joseph's School, Farnworth.

The Bolton TIC will be an academy for young inventors and budding entrepreneurs, and will offer a hybrid of a university laboratory, a research and development workshop, and an engineering tool room.

Funded by the North West Development Agency and Bolton Council, the centre is set to open early in 2004 and will be a resource for the whole town.

Keith Harris, Mount St Joseph Chair of Governors, said they were now appointing contractors for the project.

He added: "Youngsters who go through the centre should be two years ahead than their counterparts who have not gone through the centre."

Bolton TIC aims to help 14 to 19-year-olds realise their potential to become the high performing technologists, project managers and entrepreneurs of the future.

It will serve all schools in the area, Higher Education, as well as industry and businesses. With cutting edge technology, specialist staff, support from technicians, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs and a comprehensive programme of education, the centre will equip its graduates in a way not provided by any other programme for students of their age.

Cllr Linda Thomas, Bolton Council Executive Member for Education, said: "By their mid-teens, the Technology Innovation Centre graduates will have had first-hand experience of the tools needed as a future innovator or entrepreneur. The centre will have equipped them with skills and experience normally only gained by students two years older."

Paul Abbott, the TIC instigator, said: "The centrepiece will be a research and development hall, with other dedicated areas including a Computer-Aided Design area, incubation suite, technicians' base, 'think tank' and a combined exhibition hall and lecture theatre.

"Imagine young people using state-of-the-art technologies in creative ways in a place where everyone believes that anything is possible and where everyone wants to make things happen."

For schools, the TIC will provide specialist equipment and opportunities normally beyond their reach. It will not replace the school curriculum but, offer enhancements to students' educations.

For businesses, there are unprecedented opportunities to influence the development of motivated and capable young people who could be their potential future employees.