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Sir Rod Aldridge

Sir Rod Aldridge OBE worked in local government on the south coast of England before studying in the evenings to earn his professional qualification as an accountant. He then worked for the professional body of accountants in the public sector and worked on developing guidelines for the implementation of IT systems in local authorities. From this sprang the idea of offering IT outsourcing services to the public sector. Aldridge spun the operation out of the professional body and led the development of what became Capita from one employee to 74,000. On retirement from Capita his philanthropic work includes Ada, the National College for Digital Skills to help develop the core of skilled coders in the UK

Professor Liz Bacon

Professor of Software Engineering, champion of women in STEM, Vice-Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Abertay University in Dundee. With others she helped change the school curriculum in computing and set-up over 200 computers at school hubs across the country to train the teachers to deliver it.

Lord Kenneth Baker

Lord Kenneth Baker is a politician who has had most influence on the UK IT industry. He was appointed the first minister of IT in 1981 and spent four years promoting IT and the IT industry. He salvaged International Computers Limited (ICL), the state-owned computer company, twice. He launched IT82 a successful awareness campaign which coincided with the second year of the BBC Micro and its accompanying BBC TV programmes.

David Barker

David Barker was one of the UK’s first internet entrepreneurs in 1994 and spent ten years working with global corporations including Intel, Cisco and Microsoft. David decided to exit in 2004 and became a social entrepreneur to tackle some of the issues facing society – mainly around social mobility, unemployment and poverty.

Since 2005 David has been innovating new social enterprise start-ups using Tech for Good. To increase capacity and scalability, in 2015 he founded Techcentre, The Social Innovation Agency, to work in partnership with clients to innovate new tech-enabled social enterprise start-ups.

Iann Barron

Iann Barron nurtured three generations of computer designers in the UK at Elliott Brothers, Computer Technology (CT) and InMos. He designed a computer at Elliott’s for the RAF. He left to form his own company, CT, in 1965 and raised private capital to fund it, one of the first to do so in the world. He was forced out of CT in 1975 and after a spell as a consultant joined the InMos venture of the National Enterprise Board designing the transputer microprocessor.

Paul Barry-Walsh

After leaving IBM in 1986, Paul founded Safetynet, then in 1996 Netstore and in 2001 he founded The Fredericks Foundation which has become one of the UK’s leading micro-finance organisations. In 2005 alongside Paul & Peter Sedgwick, he founded Frank Investments. This business was established to provide long term investment management services to a partnership of investors

Victor Basta

Victor Basta is a maestro of mergers and acquisitions in the IT sector. He says he is somebody who helps other people through deals rather than doling deals himself. He became Managing Director of Magister, a boutique investment bank based in London and San Francisco. His first deal was selling LoveFilm to Amazon for around $350 million, now Amazon Prime Video.

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Sir Rod Aldridge

Professor Liz Bacon

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Dr Louise Bennett