Sarah Cox

Sarah is Innovation Missions Programme Director for Innovation SuperNetwork and has 13 years of expertise in design-driven innovation and systems redesign. She designs and leads innovation missions programmes to build working relationships across industry, local government and research institutions to tackle Net Zero priorities. These programmes create new value chains and clusters of activity across key supply chains, and provide the funding and framework to rapidly test and adopt a range of solutions most needed to deliver impact and support systemic change.

She also has expertise in developing design-led innovation skills in individuals, and in building cohorts of innovators to embed design capacity in their organisations and networks to better tackle Net Zero demands. These have been shortlisted for Learning and Development awards, for example her Design-Driven Innovation Champions course was recognised by the Utility Week Awards.

Sarah has also built expertise in tracing the impact of systemic change initiatives like innovation missions and ecosystem development programmes beyond traditional metrics that miss much of the value that design-driven programmes deliver. Her latest work in this area includes co-developing an impact toolkit (funded by the ESRC) with funders and local government, to present alternative metrics to quantify and trace the impact of such interventions.