Sam Markey

Ecosystem Director - Place Leadership at Connected Places Catapult | UK

Sam Markey is Ecosystem Director for Place Leadership at Connected Places Catapult, the UK’s innovation accelerator for cities, transport, and place leadership. Overseeing the company’s strategic investments, partnerships, and programmes with cities and regions across the UK, Sam is responsible for ensuring the organisation delivers on its mission to connect people, businesses, and communities for a future of sustainable growth and prosperity. He currently focusses on fostering collaborative leadership between local organisations around shared strategies for economic renewal and empowering local public service managers to adopt smarter spending practices. The idea behind this is to leverage public contracts to spark innovation and the civic investment needed to unlock the power of private finance to curate inclusive, thriving hubs of innovation. Previously, Sam was a senior policy and implementation advisor in the UK Government Cabinet Office, where he worked on public service reform, policy innovation, and the application of emerging technologies to tackle policy challenges. Before this, with the London Borough of Barnet, Sam created the original – and infamous! – ‘Barnet Graph of Doom’ which laid out the budget challenge facing local government from a decline in central grants and rising demand.