Professor Russel Griggs OBE started his business life in marketing in the pharmaceutical industry and then moved to the consumer flooring industry before becoming CEO of an industrial textile company in England in the 1980s.  In 1990 he joined Scottish Enterprise in a business development role and became an Executive Director of Scottish Enterprise where he ran the investment banking and business development arms, as well as spending some years in the USA looking at outward investment for Scottish companies.

Since then he has had a number of non-executive positions in the private, public and third sector, as well as undertaking a variety of strategic work for public bodies and private companies. He was Chair of the CBI’s UK SME Council during the financial crisis and of various other government committees. He was also a Board member and Chair of the Audit Committee of VisitScotland, a Board member of Scottish Enterprise, a Non-Executive Director of the Scottish Government, and a Board member and Chair of the Audit Committee of the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland.  In 2011 he was appointed jointly by the banks, industry, and UK Government as the Independent External Reviewer to the task force for clearing banks in the UK to create and ‘audit’ their new appeals process for businesses appealing against credit being declined. He has also done a number of other reviews for HMT and the financial sector in the UK.

He is currently Chair of South of Scotland Enterprise, the newly created Economic Development Agency for the south of Scotland, and led the team that created it prior to that. He also chairs the Scottish Government’s independent Regulatory Review Group who advise and work on better regulation in Scotland, as well as being Chair of Scottish Mines Restoration Trust which is restoring derelict opencast sites in Scotland, and is a Board member of Lenlyn Holdings Ltd which is a large business in the financial sector.

He is honorary Professor of the University of Glasgow and was an Associate Professor at Boston University, and a member of the board of the Business School at Georgia Southern University. He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2008 for services to Scottish industry.