Dr Richards serves as RYAH’s principal servant leader. His passion is inspiring, enabling and empowering RYAH’s team of innovative people to achieve amazing results, in terms of customer experience, advancing the development of our family of devices and technologies, and the growth of sales, profits and corporate value.
Major accomplishments over his four decade career include early research shaping ideas about the future of work and the emergence of knowledge work in a global digital economy, pioneering value psychology, user-driven design of multimedia network applications, and customer-employee loyalty research. Later career accomplishments included leading the Open World Vision of Nortel Networks for globally commercializing the Internet, engaging a global network of partners as champion of Oracle’s global philanthropic education initiative; formulating and executing strategies to break into and grow key markets (US, Europe, Japan), including winning a $1 Billion per annum customer from an entrenched competitor; revitalizing Nortel’s UK Switching business, growing turnover from £200M to £350M in a single year; architecting and executing the marketing strategy that in one year tripled sales of digital office systems, key to Nortel’s rapid penetration of the US telecom market, and breaking into Japan as NTT’s first western technology supplier. As a globally P&L-responsible senior executive with Nortel Networks, Dave led teams that generated many $Billions of profits and shareholder value. He championed and managed about $1.2 Billion of R&D investments leading to global industry leadership during the boom of internet growth.
In 1993, Dr Dave cofounded the MIT Innovation Lab, which led to important insights on building value through a multi-faceted focus on innovation, shared in his best-selling book, The Seven Sins of Innovation: A Strategic Model for Entrepreneurship – which “elevates the thinking on this crucial subject to the highest level” according to Roger Lacey, Chief Strategy Officer, 3M.
For the past decade, Dave has served various enterprises as a board director or advisor, Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society, and Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, and the Institute of Directors. His PhD in Mathematical Psychology and Neuroscience was awarded by the University of Toronto. Dave is a tri-national ‘Canadian-American-Brit’, living with his family in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC.
