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Bradford alumnus Rob Wilmot appointed as new Chair of Common Purpose Charitable Trust

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Tech entrepreneur, and University of Bradford alumnus, Rob Wilmot, BSc Electronic Imaging and Media Communications 1994, has been appointed as the new Chair of Common Purpose Charitable Trust. Undertaking a term as Chair of up to three years, he will replace previous Chair Robert Care, Principal at worldwide engineering group Arup, who has stepped down after serving a two year term.

Rob Wilmot, who is also a visiting Fellow and Honorary Doctor of the University, is the CEO of online idea management platform Crowdicity and was previously one of the three founding executives of UK internet service provider, Freeserve, in 1998; and shortly afterwards became one of the youngest ever executive officers of a FTSE 100 company at the age of 29.

For the last three years Rob has worked with the UK Government Cabinet Office as a non-executive Director of the Crown Commercial Service, serving until recently as HM Government’s Crown Representative for Software. Here he spent his two and half year tenure at the heart of digital transformation helping to build commercially savvy leadership capability in IT software procurement within central Government Departments and the wider public sector - driving hundreds of millions of pounds of savings for the UK tax-payer in the process.

Rob also has interests in several digital marketing and e-business consulting ventures including bcsAgency and eCommonSense. All of this experience puts Rob in an excellent position to lead Common Purpose as we further develop a programme of ‘blended learning’ in leadership development, which combines on and offline learning.

As part of our ‘blended learning’ programme, we have so far created an online course with FutureLearn called Developing Cultural Intelligence for Leadership. We are also working with Rob Wilmot’s Crowdicity to launch a worldwide online innovation community which crowdsources ideas for charity-led projects; most recently, we are running a Comic Relief-funded challenge to source ideas on how to increase civic engagement.

Rob Wilmot spoke about his appointment: “The world needs more leaders who are able to lead across boundaries. Over the last 26 years, Common Purpose has demonstrated that this can be achieved, in part, through its unique brand of leadership development. Continuing Robert Care’s work and taking its leadership development online through blended learning and the crowdsourcing of ideas to drive innovation is an exciting challenge and one I hope I can contribute to with my own skill set.”

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