RICHARD HILL, CHAIRMAN

In addition to being Chair of Innovantage’s Board of Directors, Richard is also a Director of E-CRM Solutions, a company that specialises in E-business, E-commerce, E-marketing and E-CRM for SMEs. He is also a non-executive director of Innovecom, a computer networking company.

Previously he was Managing Director of Person to Person Services Ltd. a major face-to-face fundraising company for charities and before that a Partner and Director of R. P. M. Business Strategies & Solutions, providing implementation consulting in IT, E-business and marketing. Clients included AAH Pharmaceuticals, Northern Ireland Electricity, Royal & Sun Alliance and Willis.

He has been involved in a £20million MBO and was responsible for launching Royal Insurance’s direct writing subsidiary (now MORE TH>N) and, as chairman and managing director, developing the business to over 600,000 policies and £16 m. profit in seven years.

MATTHEW DEWSTOWE, FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR

Matthew began his career with National Power back in 1994 as a Software Engineer with their R&D division in Swindon. A move to CSC, one of the world’s outsourcing IT giants, saw Matthew take responsibility for delivery of IT services across multiple British Aerospace sites.

At the turn of the millennium a new career beckoned.  Invited to join a new recruitment consultancy based in Bristol, Matthew developed and managed many high level technical accounts across the UK. After many years of success in developing tailored recruitment solutions, the opportunity for Innovantage was born.

ATANAS KIRYAKOV, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

Atanas is the head of Ontotext Lab, a subsidiary of Sirma Group – a top three Bulgarian software house.  Ontotext is a leading developer of core semantic technology, with typical applications in Knowledge Management, Semantic Web, Enterprise Applications Integration, Business Intelligence and Media Monitoring. The laboratory is involved in research projects with a total budget over 90 million Euros in several areas related to KR, NLP, web services, business process management, and cognitive science.

Atanas joined Sirma in 1993 as a Software Engineer and later became a partner. In 2000 he founded Ontotext and joined the board of Sirma Group. Between 2001 and 2004, Atanas was a member of the board of the Bulgarian Association of Software Companies (BASSCOM) and the chairman of its Working group on Education, Research and Innovations. 

ALAN PATMORE, FINANCE DIRECTOR

Alan began his career with Deloitte and then moved to Coopers & Lybrand before moving into international positions in industry with Dowell Schlumberger and Black & Decker. 

Thereafter he became European Finance Director for Lawson Mardon Packaging and then Peak Technologies Group. In these roles, Alan built up great experience in financial planning function including annual budgets, treasury, cash flows and tax planning, European acquisitions and all legal and secretarial issues relating to UK and European operations.