Sir James Dyson is the founder of Dyson. On leaving school, he earned a place at the prestigious Byam Shaw School of Art and went on to study architectural design at the Royal College of Art before working for British engineering business, Rotork. But an idea for an unconventional plastic barrow – with a ball rather than a wheel – ultimately drew James away from the safety and comfort of a salary. He pursued it alone in 1974. Just four years later he would be inspired to create a revolutionary cyclonic vacuum cleaner.
 
James was awarded a CBE in 1996 and made a Knight Bachelor in 2007.  He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015, and in the 2016 New Year Honours was appointed to the Order of Merit.
 
The James Dyson Foundation is James’s charitable arm. Founded in 2002, its objective is to inspire the next generation of engineers through its work in schools and universities.  It does this through scholarships, engineering workshops, university partnerships and the annual James Dyson Award, an international student design competition.  The Foundation also supports medical research and hospitals and charities. Since its conception, the Dyson Family has donated over £145m to charitable and educational causes.
 
James founded The Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology in 2017 to offer not just an education, but the start of an accelerated Dyson career. It combines the academic rigour of a traditional university with hands-on and real-world experience of working on live product and technology projects inside a global technology company. Dyson’s Undergraduate Engineers are paid a salary from day one and pay no tuition fees.
 
The Dyson Family owns Dyson Farming, the UK’s largest farming business, which stretches to 36,000 acres and produces 40,000 tonnes of wheat, 9,000 tonnes of spring barley, 12,000 tonnes of potatoes, 29,000 tons of sugar beet and 1,250 tonnes of strawberries as well as rearing 2,000 sheep and 800 cattle. It is a family-owned enterprise unlike any other, focussed on long-term investment in British farming and the countryside. Sustainable food production, food security and the environment are vital to the UK’s health and economy and James Dyson believes there is a real opportunity for technology to drive a revolution in agriculture. Dyson Farming is developing new approaches to efficient, high-technology agriculture and food production, in harmony with the natural environment, to create a positive farming model for the future.