Our Story

Chris Lawer, Founder of Umio. Oxford. 

In September 2006, mid-way through my PhD at Cranfield and having just returned from driving my very young family all the way to Italy and back for a friend's wedding, I finally succumbed to a life-long inflammatory disease and was rushed to hospital having lost two stones in a matter of weeks.

I lay in isolation for three weeks, listening to the repeated news cycle on the radio and watching the little hand on the vivid red wall clock slowly creep past each hour as my life was put on hold. After exhausting every possible medication treatment, the only option left was to remove a sizeable chunk of my insides - requiring the ongoing use of a medical device stuck to my body for the rest of my life.

The timing was atrocious. I had just returned from Aspen, Colorado, where I had trained on Strategyn's outcome-driven innovation method and secured the GB and Ireland licence to offer it. Recuperating at home and getting used to a drastically changed body and life, I set my sights on re-emerging at the first ever Front End of Innovation Europe conference in Munich the following January.

Arriving in the sub-zero city, I had spent an hour on the booth before chatting to anyone. Just then, Peter from Coloplast - a product director of the global Danish company providing medical devices for my exact new condition and lifestyle - stopped by. As we spoke about user needs and how to capture them, I hesitated to declare that I was a patient myself, and that I could probably offer more useful insights into his product strategy than any research method. As the conversation became more awkward in my pretence at objectivity, I came clean - the first time I had told anybody since the operation.

We spent the next hour exploring how I could help him and Coloplast. My first client had been secured.

Back at Cranfield the following year, I met Nicki Sutton. She was researching outcome-driven innovation and came to interview me about the method. That conversation turned into a collaboration, and Nicki joined me in building what would become Umio. For the next seven years she was at the centre of everything - bringing rigour, warmth, and a distinctive intelligence to every project we undertook together.

Together, Nicki and I completed dozens of innovation and research projects with Coloplast and many other leading medtech, pharma, and health organisations - in almost every health system in Europe, and in the US, Canada, Japan, Korea, and China. Throughout, I was managing my own condition, learning to navigate it in unusual places and difficult circumstances, while simultaneously conducting research with hundreds of patients living with their own.

When Nicki left to join Cambridge Design Partnership, where she later became a partner, she carried the early work forward in her own remarkable way. The years that followed were among the most intellectually intensive of my career. Without the demands of running a full team, I turned inward - deepening the philosophical foundations, reading more widely, and pushing the framework further than the commercial project work had allowed. Drawing on Bergson, Deleuze, and Adorno, I developed Health Ecosystem Value Design into its full form - published in 2017 - and then pushed further still, producing Interactional Creation of Health in 2021. Between 2020 and 2024 I taught the framework to undergraduate and Masters architecture students at the New York Institute of Technology, watching it find new life in the hands of people designing the built environments that shape how health is lived. These were books and ideas that were mine alone to write and develop.

Throughout all of it, a question I could not stop asking kept growing louder: why do health systems so consistently fail to see what the people in their care are actually living through? The research had made me a better patient. Being a patient had made me a better researcher. And twenty years of working at that intersection eventually produced Real Lived Experience - the framework, the tools, and the platforms that Umio is built on today.

In June 2024, Nicki returned. The RLX framework had reached a point where its potential for growth needed exactly the kind of thinking she had always brought - rigorous, human, and practically grounded. She rejoined Umio to help build that growth, and has since played a central role in developing the Concepts function within Bergson - one of the platform's most powerful capabilities for translating lived experience insight into actionable innovation.

Some collaborations, it turns out, are not finished. They are just interrupted.