Innovator of the Year Awards: Leeds
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For the Yorkshire and Northeast region, three finalists joined us for lunch — out of a record total of 176 entries across the whole of the UK — to pitch their ventures to our distinguished panel of judges. The finalists you’ll hear about on this podcast are: Testcard, in the healthcare sector; MudDaddy, a portable dog shower and Tofooco. After lunch, we also met Powersheds via Zoom who couldn’t make it to the pitching lunch.
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!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to the Spectators podcast series for our Economic Innovator of the Year Awards for 2022. |
| 0:15.1 | I'm Martin Van der Weir, business editor of The Spectator, and as ever, it's my pleasure to introduce this podcast |
| 0:23.1 | covering the Yorkshire and Northeast region for which we met at the Dakota Hotel in Leeds, |
| 0:31.3 | and we met three of the four finalists over a splendid lunch. |
| 0:36.0 | They each delivered pitch of about 15 minutes, |
| 0:39.4 | including some Q&A from our distinguished judges. |
| 0:43.2 | We heard from Test Card in the healthcare sector, |
| 0:48.2 | a company called Product Global, whose product is called Muddadi, |
| 0:52.8 | so that's how we'll refer to it, and the Tofu Company. |
| 0:58.6 | After lunch, we met a fourth finalist by Zoom, power sheds from Bradford, who weren't |
| 1:06.6 | able to come to lunch because they were busy developing new business in the United States. |
| 1:13.5 | So it was a pleasure to meet all four. |
| 1:16.0 | And our esteemed panel of judges today for this region were Gordon Black, former manufacturer |
| 1:25.1 | of a variety of products, mostly for Marks and Spencer, now venture capitalist, |
| 1:30.8 | Caroline Theobald, who chairs the Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University and is also |
| 1:38.6 | an entrepreneur and representing our sponsors InvestTech, Michelle White, Dan Sheehan, and Rowena Houston. |
| 1:47.4 | So you'll hear all their voices on this podcast. |
| 1:50.9 | Right. Thank you very much. So four companies to talk about on this podcast. |
| 1:56.5 | The first we heard from is the Tofu company, T-O-F-O-O-O-Tofoo company, represented by Dave Nibs, co-founder |
| 2:06.9 | with his wife Lydia. |
| 2:08.2 | The company is based in a small market town in North Yorkshire called Malton that I know very |
| 2:13.9 | well, which has turned itself from a dying market town with a bypass 30 years ago |
... |
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