Ian Kilpatrick has departed Nuvias and set up a new venture designed to encourage children into STEM careers.
Kilpatrick co-founded Wick Hill in 1978 before it was flogged to Rigby Group as a $150m-revenue cybersecurity VAD in 2015.
His next venture is designed to encourage young people into STEM careers, with a focus on primary schools and particularly getting more girls and minorities involved in science and engineering.
The business is called STEM Generations and will sell workstations into primary and secondary schools to encourage adoption of STEM learning into curriculums, where Kilpatrick says where investigative science has lagged since it was removed from SATs in 2009
Kilpatrick has launched the business in partnership with Keith Atkins, an ex headmaster, Ofsted Inspector and government advisor, who designed the STEM workstations.
Kilpatrick started his career in a financial management consultancy and one of his assignments in the late seventies was to help a group of HP employees acquire a company so that they could develop complementary software for HP’s minicomputer system, the HP 3000, which had just launched.
The business expanded into other markets, including the likes of IBM and Unix, and went into distribution in the early 1980’s and moved into Germany in the early 1990’s through acquisition.
As the connectivity market started to decline Wick Hill pivoted to the cybersecurity space.
Kilpatrick has now stepped away from his role at Nuvias but will stay connected to the cyber community through his consultancy business.
