About us

So hi, my name is David Plumb, I’m the Chief Innovation Officer here at the University of Warwick. That means that I work with businesses helping them start, scale, and pivot their organizations. I work with our academics so that we can get their research and development out, making an impact for society. We help students with opportunities to be entrepreneurial and have a go at innovation, and we work with investors so we can bring their ideas and their funding to go after new opportunities.

The University of Warwick is a really unique place – born just over 50 years ago to help us reinvent our region. We needed to support businesses and people. With that mindset, that absolute link to businesses, we then have educational excellence on top of that. For example, last year the Times Good University Guide had us as number one for teaching excellence in the UK.

From a research point of view, actually, our R&D makes us a Russell Group University, research intensive, a real superpower. It’s really unique to have this kind of business-first ethos, excellence in teaching, and excellence in research. When we put all of that together and start to think about our innovation district, which takes us outside of the campus, we’re able to bring in investors, we’re able to bring in regulators, other businesses, and also corporate partners.

And together, that sort of interdisciplinary focus on the world’s big challenges, with all the facilities and excellence, means that we can really push things forward. We can try new things, we can take risks, we’ve got different brains in the room. That’s a super exciting ecosystem, and the Warwick Innovation District is really about bringing all of that together, to collaborate and to try and really move things forward.

I had 25 years in the commercial world, and my last role was as Chief Digital Officer for one of the largest companies in the UK, but then when I moved back to the West Midlands, I realized that the region had a real existential threat—that is the combustion engine disappearing, the risks for our supply chains, and for jobs of companies.

I wanted to do something that was ‘values-driven’ and would help me see that I’m doing something to help the region. When I look at my role, what I’m really trying to do is to support the companies, the talent, the founders, the people in this region to both protect jobs, to develop technologies, to found new companies, and most of all to create high-value new jobs that are going to be needed in the next decade.