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Ian Ritchie
Ian Ritchie is Chairman of iomart plc., Computer Application Services Ltd., Scapa Technologies Ltd. the Interactive Design Institute, and Caspian Learning Ltd. He is a non-executive Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
He is a trustee of the National Museums of Scotland, a member of the board of Our Dynamic Earth, the leading Edinburgh science-based visitor attraction, and of Bletchley Park, the centre of wartime codebreaking and the birthplace of modern electronic computation. He is Chairman of Generation Science and a board member of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. He was a founding director, and Chairman (1988-1990), of the Scottish Software Federation.
Ritchie has also been active in venture capital as a director of Northern Venture Trust plc from 1997-2001 and as a member of the advisory board of Pentech Ventures from 2001.
Ritchie was awarded a CBE in the 2003 New Years Honours list for services to enterprise and education; he is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; and a Fellow and a past-President of the British Computer Society (1998-99). He was a member of Scotland's Cultural Commission in 2005/2006. He served as a member of the UK Technology Foresight ITEC Panel from 1997-1999.
He has a BSc Hons in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University (1973), and was awarded Honorary Doctorates by Heriot-Watt University in July 2000, the Robert Gordon University in July 2001, the University of Abertay Dundee in June 2002, and the University of Edinburgh in December 2003.
He has served as Chairman of Judges for the Young Software Engineer awards since inception, the Winners on the Web awards, and as Chairman of the Scottish Financial Director of the Year awards. He has also been a judge on the joint UK Research Councils Business Plan awards, the Economist Innovation awards, and the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRoberts Awards (the UK’s premier award for engineering innovation).
He has been the Founding Chairman of Voxar Ltd, VIS Entertainment plc, Orbital Software Group plc, Digital Bridges Ltd. and Sonaptic Ltd. He was a board member of Scottish Enterprise (1999-2005), the Scottish Higher and Further Education Funding Council (SFC, 2002-2007), Channel 4 Television Corporation (2000-2005), and EPIC Group plc. (1999-2005), the UK’s leading bespoke e-learning development company.
Ritchie founded and managed Office Workstations Limited (OWL) in Edinburgh in 1984 and its subsidiary OWL International Inc in Seattle from 1985. OWL became the first and largest supplier of Hypertext/Hypermedia authoring tools (a forerunner to the World Wide Web) for personal computers based on its Guide product. OWL's customers used its systems to implement large interactive multimedia documentation systems in industry sectors such as automobile, defence, publishing, finance, and education. OWL was sold to Matsushita Electrical Industrial (Panasonic) of Japan in December 1989.
He is the author of 'New Media Publishing - Opportunities from the digital revolution' published by Financial Times Telecoms and Media Publishing (1996).
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