New CEO launches Digital Catapult’s second decade

Digital Catapult, the UK authority on advanced digital technology, recently celebrated its ten-year anniversary, marking a decade of stimulus and impact in sectors such as telecoms, manufacturing and the creative industries. The not-for-profit, funded by Innovate UK, enters its second decade with a new leader at its helm. Susan Bowen has been announced as the new CEO of the organisation focused on fostering innovation, developing new industrial sectors and driving early adoption across the UK.

Bowen is on the Board of Versarian and has recently held the position of CEO and President at Aptum Group and previously senior positions at Hewlett Packard. Bowen is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and will take up the Digital Catapult CEO role from March.

Bowen will be the third CEO in the Catapult’s history and replaces Dr Jeremy Silver in the role who has led the organisation since June 2016. Silver is a Trustee Board Member of the British Library, and a Director of AQ Ltd and FeedForward.AI. Silver is also an author, angel investor and supporter of the creative industries, having done much to establish the UK’s immersive content sector during his time at Digital Catapult. As a key supporter of the Catapult programme, Silver was also Chair of the Catapult Network for a year from 2021-2022.

Founded in 2013, Digital Catapult has consistently signposted areas of opportunity offered by new technologies and created strategic programmes and facilities to enable UK companies to be successful early adopters. Over the last five years alone, Digital Catapult has helped 174 startups to raise £555 million, engaged with nearly 3,000 companies, and delivered 303 projects and programmes. Since its inception, Digital Catapult has opened 20 facilities across the country and quintupled its headcount from 50 in 2013 to over almost 300 this year. The amount of private investment raised by companies who have worked with Digital Catapult over the last 10 years is around £4bn.

Digital Catapult has identified three major areas of applied technology where the UK has an opportunity for global leadership. These cross-sector application areas combine advanced digital technologies like 5G and AI to generate tangible benefits in the real world. They are in digital infrastructure, virtual environments and supply chains. Across these three areas, Digital Catapult is driving over £270m worth of collaborative R&D and commercial programmes, which are helping hundreds of companies to be successful early adopters of advanced digital technology, increasing interoperability between their products, reducing carbon emissions and demonstrating the market value of new approaches.