Dr. Ali Hawks Chair of the Board at CMP UK wins prestigious Innovation & Creativity Award at Women in Defence UK Awards 2022
Dr. Ali Hawks was named winner of the Innovation & Creativity Award, during the Women In Defence Awards ceremony, held at The Guildhall, London last Thursday 24th November.
Ali was awarded as a result of her Founding CMP UK, a UK education charity focussed on helping the government solve their biggest challenges, by engaging and teaching an innovative, post graduate module called Hacking for Ministry of Defence, or H4MoD. Ali has grown the charity from the ground up in the UK, building relationships within government and defence, as well as securing government funding for three years for the charity to continue to run the programme. Ali’s first course - after months of hard-work developing the programme and materials - was launched in the summer of 2019 at King's College London.
H4MoD is open to all within the Ministry of Defence to submit a current official level problem, which the CMP team then curate and match to a university team. Teams of four to five students then work together collaboratively on validating and potentially solving the problem. Which not only teaches students develop critical thinking skills, the MoD are gaining deeper insight and understanding of their problem as a minimum output.
Ali was convinced that the charity's innovative education programmes could help UK Defence, and UK government more widely, to overcome entrenched problems and inefficiencies including buying solutions without properly identifying the problem, and failing to check desirability. Initially as Executive Director, and now as Chair of the Board of CMP, Ali has led and driven the organisation to achieve its core objectives, including to help defence to solve their most challenging problems in a rapid, repeatable and scalable way.
The annual Awards, run by Women in Defence UK, is to recognise and celebrate incredible work, provide inspiration and promote the value of women in the sector. Since the launch, over 2700 nominations have been made – that’s nearly 350 stand-out individuals and teams a year.
Immediately after leaving the stage we asked Ali how she felt to be awarded: “I’m blown away by all the talent in the room. The fact I get to be a part of it, to meet all of them and listen to their stories, makes me extraordinarily humbled.”