Innovator of the Year Awards: Bristol and Birmingham
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2022
⏱️ 180 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Birmingham, the finalists in this podcast were MoM incubators, Hybrid Air Vehicles and Bambino Mio. The judges, Martin Vander Weyer, business editor of The Spectator met Steve Hewitt, non-executive director of Gymshark; Clive Bawden, COO of Warwick Music and former finalist of the Innovator of the Year Awards and Michelle White representing Investec.
The judges faced the tough task of comparing businesses in very different sectors and stages of development. But all four made compelling pitches – and the variety of entries is part of the fun of these awards.
We hope all the companies we meet gain from the networking opportunities, benefit from the accolade of being selected as finalists and enjoy the buzz, the conversation and the lunch. We hope Spectator readers and podcast listeners also enjoy following the search for this year’s ultimate winners – and will take a few minutes to explore the finalists' websites and products.
More Economic innovator of the Year Awards podcasts coming shortly!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Economic Innovator of the Year awards for 2022. |
| 0:11.1 | I'm Martin van der Weir, business editor of The Spectator, and it's my pleasure to introduce |
| 0:17.4 | this year's Midlands and Southwest Regional Awards finalists. |
| 0:23.7 | We invited finalists from those regions to lunch with us, respectively in Birmingham and Bristol, |
| 0:33.4 | and to pitch their businesses to our distinguished panel of judges. |
| 0:39.3 | That's in-house judges from The Spectator and our fine sponsor InvestTech |
| 0:45.3 | and some guest judges who you'll hear from as well. |
| 0:50.3 | For the Birmingham lunch, the Midlands region, you'll be hearing from mom incubators, hybrid air vehicles, and Bambino Mio. |
| 1:05.4 | After each finalist gives us a short version of their pitch. |
| 1:17.6 | Our judges, Steve Hewitt, who's a non-executive director of Jim Shark and a successful entrepreneur in his own right. |
| 1:19.8 | Clive Borden, chief operating officer of Warwick Music and a previous winner of these awards, |
| 1:25.4 | and Michelle White representing InvestTech will give us |
| 1:30.6 | their view on each of the pitches. |
| 1:34.7 | Next, we went to Bristol. The businesses there that we met were neighbourly, octopus hydrogen, verto and zap map. To discuss them, I was joined by |
| 1:49.8 | Sam Wright and Michelle White from Investech again, Nathan Goddard, an entrepreneur from student |
| 1:59.2 | roofs, as a guest judge, |
| 2:02.1 | and Nicholas Hardy, who has had a long career on the finance side of major public companies. |
| 2:11.3 | First, let's hear from Birmingham, starting with Bambino Mio. |
| 2:17.8 | Starting a business selling reusable app is in the mid-90s, everybody thought we were mad. |
| 2:22.1 | Everybody was using disposables and wasn't it what everybody was going to use from there on in? |
| 2:26.3 | So it was definitely a hard start and we were definitely selling to hardened environmentalists when we first started as far as reusable nappies is |
| 2:35.3 | concerned. I mean disposables is a huge environmental problem. 90 billion disposable nappies are |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Spectator and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.