Trustee: Jim Dawton

Jim Dawton is a prominent advocate for the role of design in innovation. Having designed consumer products for the first half of his career a focus on healthcare over the past 17 years has brought him to the forefront of the use of design in technology R&D, service delivery and policy. He now applies this to a wide range of sectors.

As a co-founding Director of Impeller Ventures Jim is pioneering a new approach to innovation. He advises the public, third and private sectors and regularly speaks on national and international platforms. Jim currently holds advisory roles on the UK Government’s National Measurement System’s Life Sciences & Health programme and the NHS’s Clinical Entrepreneur Programme and is a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield University’s Management School.

Jim has lived in the area for the past 30 years, the most recent 20 in Streatham itself. As a designer he loves to solve problems and as a resident, he’s passionate about the local community. So, when he got chatting with David Harvey in a Streatham coffee shop on a cold January day in 2018, the theatre became a shared ambition and the rest, as they say, is history (in the making)!