GOVERNMENT INNOVATION PARTNERSHIP LAUNCH

The Royal Academy of Engineering wanted to formally launch its partnership with ARIA — the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, a Cabinet Office body funding high-risk, high-reward scientific research.

The event would introduce ARIA’s innovation programmes to the Academy’s network of Fellows, Awardees, and senior stakeholders, with the CEOs of both organisations hosting a fireside conversation.

The wider ambition stretched well beyond a single afternoon: to open up a long-term pipeline of collaboration between ARIA and the UK’s engineering community. With speakers of this calibre in the room and an audience of that quality, it needed to be exclusive, carefully curated, and genuinely worth showing up for.

Three things made this harder than it looked. First: the RAEng events team was already full — they needed us to own the whole event from the ground up, not just support on the day. We were working with their internal venue, their internal caterers, their preferred AV and filming suppliers, and a set of in-house protocols and financing processes we’d never encountered before. We had to get up to speed fast and earn the trust of their internal teams from a standing start.

Second: the date. A Friday afternoon before a Bank Holiday weekend. For context, we’d normally forecast 50% attendance on a good day — and closer to 40% when the calendar is working against you.

Third: the stakeholder count. Two senior ARIA leads, two internal RAEng leads, two high-profile CEO speakers, and five ARIA Programme Directors — each needing individual briefings, tech support, and a calm, confident point of contact throughout the day. That’s a lot of people to keep happy simultaneously, and not one of them had time for things to go wrong.

The headline figure is hard to argue with: 85% attendance on one of the most difficult dates in the events calendar, against an industry expectation of 40–50%. We ran out of chairs. That’s the kind of problem you want to have.

But the numbers only tell half the story. The atmosphere in the room was electric. Senior Fellows and ARIA Programme Directors were genuinely absorbed in each other’s work — conversations about climate solutions, quantum research, and the kind of ideas that remind you just how extraordinary human ingenuity can be. (We’ll be honest: we left a little starstruck. The innovation on show was breathtaking.) The RAEng team were able to step back, welcome guests, and take genuine pride in what they’d built — rather than running around fixing things. That, as much as anything, is what we’re for.

Everyone bounced into the Bank Holiday weekend in excellent spirits. RAEng came back to us with another event shortly after. We like to think that says more than any pitch deck could.