Why where you work matters
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A report published in 2012 declared that Here East — then barely a vision on paper — was destined to fail. The man who had just staked his career on it stood up at the event, took his right of first response, and told the room they were completely wrong. Fourteen years later, with over six and a half thousand people working across a million square feet of studios and offices on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Gavin Poole has earned the right to say so.
Many innovation centres operate with checklists: are you in AI, deep tech, biotech? Tick the right boxes or look elsewhere. Gavin’s view is that this approach kills the very thing it is trying to create. The breakthroughs happen in the adjacencies — when Sports Interactive, sitting on the world's largest football player database, finds itself in conversation with Loughborough University's sports technology team over lunch, and a sponsored PhD research programme is born before the coffee goes cold. Or when Ford, struggling to make sense of early electric vehicle tracking data, is pointed through a corridor to a small data visualisation startup called Signal Noise, and four weeks later they have a film.
That kind of collision does not happen by accident. It requires people who are present, who slow down enough to have the conversation, who are willing to be introduced and to introduce others. Gavin calls it being a conductor — not playing the instruments, but understanding how they sound together.
The work, he says, is not finished. Whatever comes next, the principle stays the same: put the right people in the right place, get out of their way, and pay close attention to what happens in between.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why proximity is the most underrated competitive advantage in business — and how the deliberate engineering of unexpected collisions between tenants has produced research programmes, commercial partnerships and careers that no strategy document could have predicted.
What Here East actually is — and why it defies easy categorisation — a property business at its simplest, but in practice a living ecosystem whose value lies not in the buildings but in the active, human work of connecting the people inside them.
The leadership philosophy behind fourteen years of sustained ambition — from a clear but deliberately wide vision, to values that have to survive scrutiny every single day, and a stubbornness that a Centre for London report predicting failure only sharpened.
Watch the episode on YouTube below, or listen via your preferred podcast app.
