Changemakers: Stian Westlake

Stian Westlake MIFFT2004 lives and breathes innovation. He also believes passionately in promoting it in the public sector. Indeed, he has dedicated his entire career to it: “I am an evangelist for innovation in government policy,” he says.

Educated at the University of Oxford, Harvard University and London Business School, Westlake has written numerous policy reports on the economics of new technologies, high-growth start-ups and venture capital, the future of automation, government innovation policy, and the economic measurement and mapping of innovation.

He spent eight years running the think tank at Nesta, the UK’s national foundation for innovation. Now he is Policy Advisor to the Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation at the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Previously he worked as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company in Silicon Valley and in London, and was the founder of a health-data social venture.

At Nesta, he was one of the most high-profile and stimulating thinkers on innovation policy around, prepared to say the unthinkable – even if it meant courting controversy. Now he’s inside the tent, does he miss the freedom to speak truth to power? Absolutely not: he loved his time at Nesta, but relishes the opportunity “to be closer to the action in terms of where and how the government spends its innovation budget and to be able to influence that process directly; to get traction in government”.

He derives great satisfaction from thinking that he has been able to make the people who matter “see things in a different way”. This doesn’t necessarily mean inspiring others to leap into action and rush a new policy out; rather, it consists of encouraging decision-makers and budget-holders to challenge long-held assumptions and let go of old nostrums, so that genuinely innovative ideas are given due airtime.