Richard Rowe is the Chief Executive Officer of the Open Learning Exchange, Inc. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in clinical psychology in 1963. In the1970's served as Associate Dean of the Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and as Director of the university’s inter-faculty Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice. He has conducted research concerning assessment of social interventions and has been an advocate for early childhood education. He has served as Chair of the Massachusetts Statewide Advisory Committee for the Office for Children, as a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education where he served both as Chair of the Selection committee for the Commissioner of Education and of the Education Reform Review Committee. He has served as Chair of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.
In the early 1960s for three years he served as Director of the Test Development and Research Office of the West African Examinations Council in Lagos, Nigeria providing the educational testing services for the former British English-speaking West African nations. After seven years at Harvard he became CEO of The Faxon Company, which over a fifteen year period he grew ten fold to a $500 million company, serving publishers and libraries throughout the world. He later founded, RoweCom, Inc., an internet version of that service which he took public in 1999 and then sold in 2001.
Dr. Rowe has served on the MIT Press Management Board and the Board of Advisors of the School of Information at the University of Pittsburgh. He was chair of the Audit Committee of the board of the publicly-traded N2H2, Inc. an internet filtering company, and is a major shareholder in the private company, Instatrac, Inc., an online publisher and a bill-tracking and documentation service for the Massachusetts legislature.
He was Director of the Internet and Information Services for the Dean for America campaign in 2003, overseeing web development, internet fund raising, the blog and the campaign's information technology support systems.
In 2005 he chaired the Organizational Future Taskforce for the Ecologic Development Fund and Ecologic Finance, two related international economic development agencies. He is on the Board of ForesTrade, Inc. an international importer of organic coffee and spices and chaired the Board's Organizational Review Task Force. He serves as a management consultant to Meetup, Inc., an internet-based company enabling people with shared interests to interact face-to-face. He chaired the Resource Analysis Working Group of Strategies for Children, an early education advocacy organization in Boston. He is a Senior Fellow of the Small Planet Institute and recently was Co-chair of the Transition Team on Technology for Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.
Dr. Rowe has focused on domestic and global policy issues related to education and services for children, families and strong communities as well as on public policy and technical issues concerning intellectual property. The author of numerous articles and frequent speaker on the impact of digitization and global communication networks upon society, he is frequently asked by both for-profit and social-benefit organizations to assist in long-range planning, meeting facilitation and mediation.
