Sarah Whitehead

Sarah is Deputy Director Customer Experience at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO). Having developed the IPO’s customer strategy, Sarah now leads the newly formed Customer Experience Unit. The Unit brings together customer expertise including insight and analysis, user research, quality and complaints handling.

Sarah is responsible for understanding the needs of the IPO’s broad customer base in order to drive Continuous Improvement and inform the IPO’s ambitious Transformation programme. She also supports the organisation in strengthening a customer-centric mindset.

In her previous role as Deputy Director for Innovation, Sarah was responsible for the IPO’s innovation policy - supporting businesses, industry and academia to get the most value from their intellectual property.  Sarah has considerable policy and legislative experience both domestically and internationally.

Sarah joined the IPO, and the Civil Service, as a patent examiner in 2009. She has a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Bath and a PhD from Manchester University.