Katy Davies becomes the East Anglia Productivity Forum's new chair for exploring ways to boost regional productivity.
The East Anglia Productivity Forum has appointed Katy Davies to chair its group of business leaders, policymakers and academics and find ways to boost productivity in across the region.
The Forum is managed by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and is one of eight across the UK that is part of The Productivity Institute – a national ESRC-funded research organisation. They are each managed by a different partner institute and involved in the implementation of research insights, design of practical business and policy interventions, and providing input to the development of the Institute’s future research agenda.
Katy is the Managing Director of ShiftMomentum, a business consultancy that works on progressive community and business programmes. She started her career at Deloitte, then at Cambridge aerospace and defence company Marshall, where she held senior leadership roles in finance before moving into operations transformation. As the previous Managing Director of CamdenBoss, a Suffolk-based manufacturer of electronic components and enclosures, she led the turnaround, growth, and diversification of the business.
Katy is also a board member of New Anglia LEP (Local Enterprise Partnership), Deputy Chair of NAAME, and an ambassador of the Productivity Institute’s partner, Be the Business. She succeeds Alex Plant, who helped establish and led the East Anglia Productivity Form but has taken on a new role as Chief Executive of Scottish Water.
On taking up the role, Katy said:
“I am deeply honoured to take on the role of Chair for the East Anglia Regional Productivity Forum. As a nation we are not good at addressing or even talking about productivity and have so much to go at in terms of understanding and improving it. I’m so impressed with the work of the Productivity Institute and indeed the forum to date and am really excited to work closely with stakeholders to harness the collective potential of our region to drive growth and prosperity.”
The Forum’s academic lead, Owen Garling, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, welcomed Katy saying:
“The UK’s productivity challenge plays out in many different ways across East Anglia. In Katy, we have a chair who understands both the issues faced by individual businesses and the region’s policy landscape. I know that she will expertly lead the Forum to help solve some of East Anglia’s particular productivity puzzles – bringing about sustained and inclusive productivity growth, and a better material standard of living regionally and nationally. Once again, I would like to thank Alex Plant on behalf of the forum for his support in establishing the forum and leading it through its initial couple of years.”
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
