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 young family all the way to Italy and back for a friend's wedding, I finally succumbed to a life-long inflammatory condition and was rushed to hospital.

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 surgery - and a permanent adjustment to a drastically changed body and 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, 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 the medical devices I now depended on - stopped by. As we spoke about user needs and how to capture them, I hesitated to declare 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. We spent the next hour exploring how I could help him and Coloplast.

My first client had been secured.

In the years that followed, Umio's work expanded across the full spectrum of health and care. Research and innovation projects with Coloplast, Mundipharma, Sanofi, Lundbeck, Reckitt, Cochlear and many others. Engagements across more than thirty countries, working directly with patients, carers, clinicians and system leaders across over twenty chronic conditions. A consistent orientation through all of it: beginning from lived reality rather than from system-defined abstractions.

Two engagements in particular shaped where the work went next. A programme on chronic pain with the Health and Social Care Research and Development Division in Northern Ireland deepened Umio's understanding of how conditions recede from - or refuse to recede from - the centre of everyday life. And a project with UK armed forces veterans living with chronic pain, funded by the Office for Veterans' Affairs Health Innovation Fund, produced something neither Umio nor its clients had seen before: a real-time method for sensing lived experience as it unfolds, rather than reconstructing it after the fact.

That work became the foundation of Ooex - Umio's sister company, and the platform on which its real-time lived experience capability now runs. Ooex is the data and community layer. Bergson, its AI platform, turns lived experience into actionable intelligence for innovators, clinicians and health systems. Together they form the operational expression of what twenty years of research made possible.

Across those seventeen years, three books emerged - Health Ecosystem Value Design (2017), Interactional Creation of Health (2021), and Real Lived Experience, co-authored with Nicki Sutton (2025). A measurement architecture - the Large Experience Model - is in patent prosecution (GB2401421.9). Between 2020 and 2024, the framework was taught to undergraduate and Masters architecture students at the New York Institute of Technology, where it found new life in the hands of people designing the built environments that shape how health is lived.

What those years produced, beyond the books, the platforms and the patent, was an answer to a question that had been growing louder across every project: why do health systems so consistently fail to see what the people in their care are actually living through? The answer Umio arrived at, and that Real Lived Experience is built to address, is that the problem is perceptual before it is structural. Health systems cannot see what they were never built to look for.

Nicki Sutton has been part of this story from near the beginning - joining Umio in 2007, moving on in 2015, and returning in 2024. Her rigour, warmth and practical intelligence have shaped the work at every stage she has been involved in.

Real Lived Experience is the current expression of twenty years of asking one question, working with hundreds of patients, and refusing the easy translations that health systems demand. It is what Umio, Bergson and Ooex are built on today - and what we believe the next generation of health and care innovation needs to begin with.