Innovator of the Year Awards: London

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The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2022

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

For the final round of The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards, our kind sponsors, Investec, hosted us at their offices on Gresham Street, London. We met 11 finalists 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.

Our finalists are: UpCircle Beauty, Elvie, Ultromics, Silverstream, eConsult Health, Itaconix, Thought Machine, Recycleye, Project Etopia and Housekeep.

The judges; Matthew Robinson who works in Private Equity with ICG;
Eva-Maria Dimitriadis CEO of Conduit Connect, and finally Kate Gribbon and Michelle White from Investec.

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 to be announced at the gala dinner on the 11th November – and will take a few minutes to explore the finalists' websites and products.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to our podcast series for the Spectator's Economic Innovator of the Year Awards for 2022.
0:14.1	As ever, I'm Martin van der Weir, business editor of The Spectator, and it's my pleasure on this occasion to introduce this year's
0:23.3	regional finalists for London and the South East. We had 11 finalists for this region. They all
0:31.6	joined us for lunch in the fabulous offices of InvestTech, our sponsor in Gresham Street in the city of London. And given that
0:41.1	we've got so many to tell you about, we're not going to include their own pitches in this podcast.
0:49.2	Instead, we're going to let our panel of judges briefly describe the companies and then share their thoughts about
0:56.5	them. We're also going to talk about the possible entries for the special sustainability
1:05.5	award that's one of our award categories. So we'll do that at the end of this podcast. The judges who are
1:13.9	with me on this occasion, who you'll hear from Matthew Robinson, who's in the private equity
1:19.8	business at a firm called ICG, Eva Marie Demetriades, who is chief executive of Conduit Connect, that is an impact investing fund,
1:33.7	linking together large number of investors in that field.
1:39.5	And representing Investec today, Kate Gribbon, head of financial sponsor coverage for private equity,
1:48.1	and Michelle White, Senior Investment Director.
1:52.0	So we're in the city of London.
1:53.8	We've heard pitches from no less than 11 finalists chosen from more than 80 in London and the Southeast this year and from more than
2:03.8	170 across the whole of the UK. So, Matthew, I'm going to start with you and ask you to pick
2:10.5	out two or three of these 11 that we've seen today. As I've said on many of these podcasts,
2:16.9	we have to emphasize, we get a pretty
2:19.0	short presentation. We take a quick look at these companies. We're not bioscientists. We're not
2:25.2	artificial intelligence experts. We don't pretend to understand in depth, but we try to make
2:31.3	a fair judgment, and we love hearing from all of them.
2:34.7	So Matthew, which one's caught your eye?
	...

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