Mike Fischer

Mike David Fischer CBE is the co-founder of the computer company RM plc.

Fischer graduated with a physics degree from Oxford University. In 1973, with Mike O'Regan (who had an economics degree from Cambridge), Fischer co-founded Research Machines, a British microcomputer and then software company for the educational market. He was CEO for 24 years and became a non-executive director and lifetime president in 1997. He stood down as a non-executive director in 2004, but retains his position as lifetime president of the company.

Fischer is a founder of the Fischer Family Trust which runs projects in health and education. In education, the key project of the Fischer Family Trust has been to change the way school performance is measured in England.

Fischer is also Director of SBL, a (Community Interest) Company dedicated to improving patient treatment options through high quality, collaborative and clinically focused research, and co–founder of Alamy Ltd, a stock photography agency. Fisher is also co-founder and Chair of Videoloft Ltd, a cloud video surveillance software platform.

He and RM co-founder Mike O'Regan were awarded honorary degrees by the Open University in 2002.

Personal life and education Fischer completed an undergraduate degree in physics at Oxford University in 1971 and a second undergraduate degree in physiological sciences at Oxford University in 1978. He has also been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2002 with the other RM cofounder, Mike O’Regan.

Business ventures

RM Fischer and Mike O’Regan founded RM (as Research Machines) in 1973 as a mail-order supplier of electronic components. The company has since been expanded to provide information technology products and services to educational organisations and establishments. Fischer was CEO for 24 years and became a non-executive director and lifetime president in 1997. He stood down as a non-executive director in 2004, but retains his position as lifetime president of the company. This approach is championed by the studies of William Edwards Deming and Joseph M Juran, a.k.a. Six Sigma. According to Fischer, “ensuring high-quality manufacturing standards was the key that would unlock RM's expansion”.

Videoloft Fisher is co-founder of Videoloft, along with James West of Alamy and Tim Pearson of RM. Videoloft's software cloud-enables traditional CCTV systems, making them inherently more secure and adding powerful business intelligence.

Since 1991, the Fischer Family Trust is one of the foremost charities in the UK dedicated to improving the educational outcomes of the most vulnerable segment of pupils in UK schools. The trust is mainly involved in undertaking and supporting medical research, education and conservation projects in the UK. Fischer is a trustee of Success for All UK. Following suggestions from his team, he converted the lab to testing for COVID-19 in March 2020. The lab was quickly able to provide 250-500 tests a week to local NHS health care workers with a half-day turnaround.

After seeing the impact that testing at SBL had on the local area, Fischer wanted to encourage other labs to follow the example, and created the Covid Volunteer Testing Network, with the hope that it would expand these services and help fight the battle against COVID-19 across the UK. Fischer worked with entrepreneur Tim Perkin and the Fischer Family Trust to provide support in the form of a supply chain of reagents. This later became the Covid Testing Network that has supported UK government Pillar 2 and Pillar 4 testing as well as workplace testing across the UK.