Rohan Silva

Rohan Silva is the co-founder of Second Home, a social enterprise that supports creativity, entrepreneurship and job creation in cities around the world.

Rohan was previously Senior Policy Adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, where he worked across all areas of policy, but was particularly passionate about enterprise, innovation and technology. He was responsible for developing key policies to improve the environment for enterprise in the UK, such as the Entrepreneur Visa, Entrepreneur Relief, angel investment tax breaks, the Government’s Open Data agenda, and the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property.

On industrial policy, Rohan created the Government’s hugely successful Tech City initiative, which helped build the world’s fastest growing technology cluster in East London, and also created the Government’s Life Science Strategy in 2011, as well as the follow-up strategy in 2012 focused on genomics and bioinformatics.

Rohan is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art, a World Economic Forum ‘Young Global Leader’, and serves on the boards of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the London Contemporary Music Festival. Rohan was previously a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Policy Fellow at Cambridge University.

In the media, Rohan has a weekly column in the Evening Standard, and also writes regularly for the Sunday Times and other publications. Rohan has also presented a full-length BBC Panorama documentary on the impact of technology on jobs and income inequality, and also made films for Newsnight, a critically acclaimed documentary for Radio 4, as well as numerous appearances on the Today Programme and other flagship current affairs programmes.