Andrea Cooper
Service Director for Adult Social Care Modernisation, Cornwall Council
Andrea Cooper is the Service Director for Adult Social Care Modernisation at Cornwall Council, previously founder of the UK Govt's Policy Innovation Unit including Policy Lab, the Open Innovation Team and SKYrooms innovation spaces. With a first class Honours in Design, Masters in Public Policy and PhD in Digital, her multi-award winning work has received acclaim in the UK and overseas. After working in consultancy and academia, she joined the Design Council in 2001 becoming their first Chief Design Officer. Here she led innovation programmes for the Department of Health and Home Office. Following this Andrea was Programme Director for a social enterprise called Designs of the Time (Dott) before becoming the first Chief Designer in Local Government at Cornwall Council. She subsequently led digital communications for Innovate UK, as well as consulting to Unilever and Channel Four. Andrea is regularly invited to speak and write about people-centred change, advising governments, the European Commission, OECD and the United Nations. A TEDx speaker, she has been invited to give over 100 keynotes across five continents including recent talks at Google and Stanford. Andrea has maintained close links with academia through fellowships at Cambridge and Northumbria Universities and is currently a faculty member of Nesta’s States of Change. She has delivered executive leadership training for the LSE, Oxford SAID, Cambridge Judge and Ashridge Hult. An international judge of prizes, Andrea has been a board member for a number of high profile initiatives including working in a number of guises for the European Commission. In 2015 Andrea became the 10th female in its history to receive the RSA’s Bicentenary Medal. In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from Northumbria University and in 2019 was listed by apolitical as 'one of the world’s most influential public sector innovators'.
