Sam Markey
Founder and Managing Director
With a career spanning local government, the UK Civil Service, and the technology sector, Sam is passionate about fostering impactful collaborations and turning ambitious ideas into reality.
Early in his career, Sam developed the ‘Barnet Graph of Doom’ (2011), an infamous report that forecast the looming crisis facing local government from falling revenue and rising demand. This analysis was a wake-up call about the challenging future facing public services and the impact that would have on communities.
Since then, Sam has focused on roles which allowed him to steer the country towards a brighter future through accelerating innovation adoption and building nationwide collaborative movements.
As a Senior Advisor in the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit (Cabinet Office), Sam set up the What Works Network to promote evidence-based policy making and steered delivery of the Better Care Fund, a £5.3 billion health and social care integration programme, to encourage equitable and effective partnership working between local organisations. He also helped set up a new ‘Special Projects’ team focussed on unlocking barriers to the application of emerging technologies (including offsite / digital construction and drones) to accelerate the delivery of priority policy goals.
Connect with Sam to discuss working together to deliver public sector productivity, better user outcomes and national prosperity.
Sam left central government for the technology sector in 2016, holding a range of strategic leadership roles at the Connected Places (formerly Future Cities) Catapult.
During this time, he worked directly with the Chief Executive to steer the organisation through several major transformations, including a merger, financial recovery, and the pandemic.
From 2022-25 Sam led the development and delivery of a £4.5m ‘place leadership’ program, fostering collaborative networks and empowering public authorities to become confident customers of innovation, and effective catalysts of the innovation ecosystems in their regions. This included establishing strategic initiatives like:
the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre (IPEC) to transform everyday public spending into fuel for public service innovation,
the Innovation Places Leadership Academy to equip UK regions to rise to the opportunity of devolution, and
the UK Innovation Districts Group to seed, scale and sustain more ‘hubs of innovation’ across the UK, delivering economic growth and inclusive prosperity.
In April 2025, Sam founded Recurve to continue equipping place leaders to navigate change and drive the renewal of our institutions, communities and regions.
“Sam is a composer of synergies”
— David Kershaw, Posterity Global
