I help places to mobilise capital, public spending and innovative partnerships for local renewal.

My focus is the practical side of three ideas: public procurement as a lever for policy, purposeful capital working alongside public money, and place leadership, meaning the shared work of the people responsible for a place.

That interest started in local government. At the London Borough of Barnet, I produced the 2011 forecast that became known as the ‘Barnet Graph of Doom’, forecasting the looming crisis facing local government from rising demand and falling revenue. This analysis (which the Guardian called “prophetic”) was a wake-up call about the challenging future facing our public services and the impact that would have on communities.

Since then, I've sought opportunities to address the drivers of doom by accelerating innovation adoption in local services and building nationwide collaborative movements.

Moving to the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit in central government, I set up the What Works Network to promote evidence-based policy making, represented the UK on an OECD taskforce on public sector innovation, and led deep-dive reviews of health and social care integration, whose recommendations shaped delivery of the £5.3 billion Better Care Fund.

From 2016 I spent nine years at Future Cities Catapult (which became Connected Places Catapult), working with city governments on the integration of innovative technologies and the cultivation of local innovation economies. As Director of Place Leadership I began using the term ‘place leadership’ to describe the multi-sector collaboration needed to steward cities and regions effectively. This is where procurement became a major focus of my efforts: I incubated and chaired the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre (IPEC), and co-chaired the World Economic Forum Global Smart Cities Alliance taskforce on innovation-friendly procurement.

Much of my work involves bringing people together. At Connected Places Catapult I conceived and co-led the Innovation Places Leadership Academy to equip UK regions to rise to the opportunity of devolution, with help from the Action Learning Centre and The Leadership Centre. I helped Emma Frost to formalise and expand the UK Innovation Districts Group in order to seed, scale and sustain more ‘hubs of innovation’ across the UK. And I curated Place Coalition gatherings for the Impact Investing Institute in Bristol and Sheffield, which brought councils, investors and government together around place-based impact investing.

Today I run Recurve and am Senior Associate for Place-Based Impact Investing at the Impact Investing Institute. Through this site you can book me to chair or moderate an event, give a keynote or join a panel, or write a commissioned piece of thought leadership.

Selected writing

• Mobilising the Impact Economy as Partners in National Renewal, the final report of the Social Impact Investment Advisory Group to HM Government (2025), as lead author

• Place-Based Impact Investing: Ambition to Action, Impact Investing Institute (2025), as co-author

• Partnering for Place: How mayoral combined authorities can mobilise philanthropy and the wider impact economy to deliver local priorities, AchieveGood & The Rigby Foundation (2026), as co-author

• Local Power, Global Reach, a toolkit for regional leaders funded by Invest in UK University R&D (coming soon)

Selected platforms
United Nations · World Economic Forum · UKREiiF · Smart Cities World Summit · Westminster Forum · Property Forum · Connected Places Summit · Conscious Cities Festival