Arcadis country director, Peter Hogg, has been appointed chair of the UK Innovation Corridor, a 14-council partnership covering an area described as Britain's answer to Silicon Valley.
The Corridor is made up of local authorities along with business and academic partners spanning London's Royal Docks through the Lee Valley, Hertfordshire and Essex and on to Cambridge, Peterborough and Huntingdon.
The area generates £284bn in GVA each year, representing 16% of England's total economic output.
Jackie Sadek, the outgoing Chair of the Innovation Corridor, added: ‘This Corridor is the closest thing the UK has to Silicon Valley, and it deserves infrastructure and investment to match. Peter understands how places grow and how investment decisions actually get made, meaning the Corridor is in very good hands moving forward.'
Ms Sadek steps down at the end of her three-year term in October.
Mr Hogg brings three decades of experience in delivering infrastructure programmes. He has spent the last 11 years with Arcadis, overseeing the company's work in London since 2015 as both managing director of government municipals and health and city executive for London and as London city executive and UK cities director.
He is also a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, a non-executive board member of the Confederation of British Industry and a former non-executive director of the Thames Estuary Growth Board.
Mr Hogg said: ‘This is the strongest, the most vibrant and the most global investor-attractive economic geography in the country, and it is still nowhere near its ceiling. The job now is delivery: the labs, homes, power and transport that take this economy beyond £350 billion, built across the whole Corridor from the Royal Docks to up to Cambridge, Peterborough and Huntingdon. Jackie hands over a partnership with real convening power, and I will build on this.'
