Leadership
Leadership
LWIN’s Board and an Advisory Group steer the direction of the London West Innovation Network (LWIN). Implementation is delivered by the Operational Team. LWIN is building our capacity and impact through collaboration with a wider UK/ International ecosystem of innovation clusters & districts.
THE BOARD
LWIN approach follows the ‘quintuple innovation helix’ framework and incorporates insights from the academia-industry-government-public sector-environment interactions. Hence, we have representatives from each helix on the board.
Andrew Dakers (Co-chair) is Chief Executive of West London Business. He is a life-long resident of West London. Andrew has twenty years of experience working on corporate responsibility initiatives and is a tireless campaigner on local and global issues.
Connor McDonagh has over 15 years’ experience of regeneration, planning and development working in London local authorities and with the Greater London Authority. This included securing multi-million pound investments to enable housing and employment growth and infrastructure projects. At Ealing Council he manages a multidisciplinary service that integrates climate action with growth and regeneration functions and is currently leading on the council’s economic recovery and renewal strategy.
Geoff Rodgers is Pro Vice-Chancellor Enterprise and Employment, Professor Rodgers is a member of the University’s Executive Team and provides strategic leadership to enhance the links and partnerships with external business, third sector and government organisations that further the university’s academic activity and employability of our students. He has led a number of multi-partner academic projects including NSIRC with TWI, BP, Lloyd’s Register and Network Rail, the Women in Engineering Programme, the initiation of the STEM Learning Centre at Brunel and the Central Research Laboratory accelerator and incubator with PlusX in Hayes.
Neil Impiazzi is the Partnership Development Director at SEGRO and is head of public affairs and stakeholder engagement across SEGRO’s £5bn UK property portfolio. He is currently leading the Keep London Working campaign to highlight the importance of industrial development to London’s economy and is a representative on the GLA’s newly created Industrial and Logistics Sounding Board. Neil is also a member of the Mayor of London’s East Plus joint venture team that aims to deliver up to 1.4 million sq. ft. of new industrial space in East London.
Niall Bolger is the Chief Executive of the London Borough of Hounslow. Prior to his current role, he was the Chief Executive of the London Borough of Sutton for nearly eight years. This followed a career in local government in London and the South East over more than 30 years. Niall is a qualified town planner and his professional background has been in planning, development, regeneration and environmental sustainability. He is passionate about local solutions and the power of local communities to make a massive difference to their own economic, social and environmental futures. Underpinning his career has been an unequivocal commitment to social inclusion, social justice and equality
Professor Templer holds a joint appointment with the Department of Chemistry and the Grantham Institute. He is the former Director of Innovation at the Grantham Institute and the founder of their centre for climate change innovation – Undaunted – a collaboration with the Royal Institution. Undaunted is a founding partner of Cleantech for UK. He is the current Hofmann Chair in Chemistry and is a member of the London Sustainable Development Commission and advisory body to the Mayor of London. Prompted by the outcome of collaborative research on biorefining he led, Professor Templer was part of a successful bid to the European Institute for Innovation and Technology to create a Climate Knowledge Innovation Community. In 2010 he became the Director of Climate-KIC UK and Director of Education. He and his team created a programme of education to inspire climate innovators and entrepreneurs and developed and ran the UK Cleantech Accelerator, now called the Greenhouse.
Dr Robyn Owen is currently full-time Associate Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at CEEDR, Co-lead of the GreenFin (GreenFin research cluster) research cluster and ESRC Research Fellow at the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). She specialises in early-stage SME innovation finance with a particular focus on cleantech innovation financing. Her recent contract research includes projects for the British Business Bank, Innovate UK and BEIS (UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). Robyn is currently undertaking programme evaluations of the British Business Bank’s Regional Investment Funds and Patient Capital Fund and recently completed case study environmental project evaluations for the Evaluation of the English European Regional Development Funds (ERDF). She is also an academic advisor to the London Borough of Hounslow’s Green Action Plan for London and leading grant research for the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) into the role of Biodiversity in SME finance markets and recently completed a project examining sustainable productivity measurement for the ESRC Productivity Insights Network at Sheffield University.
Seema Malhotra has been the Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament for Feltham and Heston since 2011. She is the Shadow Minister for Business and Consumers. She serves as a member of the House of Commons Exiting the European Union Select Committee and sits on the Speaker’s Committee on Representation and Inclusion. She is also co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Assistive Technology. I am also a Commissioner for the Financial Inclusion Commission. She continues to sit on the Fabian Society’s Executive Committee, after having co-founded the Fabian Women’s Network. She also chairs the APPG on Entrepreneurship and co-chair the APPG on Mortgage Prisoners.
Steve Armitage is currently Head of Innovation and Intelligent Automation in Heathrow Airport’s IT team, whose purpose is to transform Heathrow through innovation and technology.
Steve has over 30 years of airline industry expertise gained at British Airways and Heathrow Airport – operating in both IT and core business departments. Since joining Heathrow, Armitage has been involved in the first steps of passenger automation and improvements in security processing.
Toby Kress is the Programme Director at Plux X, working with innovators and industry to develop and scale innovative solutions to big challenges. Toby works with startups to design and develop innovation programmes and accelerators for corporations, startups and scaleups. Before joining Plus X, Toby led the oldest startup incubator in Shoreditch helping startups scale from launch to Series A.
Toby was formally the UK Director of REMIX, the global summit for Culture, Technology and Entrepreneurship organised in partnership with Google, Bloomberg and The British Council and in a previous life Toby managed museums and galleries in London and New York. In 2010 he co-founded tech startup Groop Gifts and in 2012 gained an Executive MBA from London Business School
OPERATIONAL TEAM
Andrew Dakers: Co-Chair, West London Innovation Network
Amelia Grant: Head of Member Services/ Better Futures Development Manager, West London Business
Toby Kress: Programme Director, Plus X
Farah Vallooran: LWIN Project Coordinator, West London Business