The Spectator's Innovator of the Year Awards: the human touch, real and virtual

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

Which are the companies that will rewrite the rules and help rebuild the economy in 2020 and beyond? The Spectator and Julius Baer have come together once again to celebrate creative entrepreneurship across the UK. On this podcast, The Spectator's business columnist Martin Vander Weyer talks to a panel of high profile judges from the business world about the finalists in the West and the South West - from contactless payment for the charities sector to 'haptic' technology which allows users to touch virtual screens.

The guest judges were Angela Luger, a newcomer to these Awards who has had a long career in consumer-facing businesses, latterly as chief executive of the online retailer N Brown until 2018 and currently as a non-exec at New Look and chair of Edinburgh-based The Paint Shed. Hugh Campbell, founder and managing partner of investment bank GP Bullhound — which advises and invests in ‘future unicorns’ — rejoined us for the third year. And the panel was completed by Dawn Li Wan Po, an executive director of Julius Baer and senior portfolio manager there.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this the second in our series of Spectator Podcasts for the Economic Innovator of the Year Awards, sponsored by the private bank, Julius Baer.
0:21.0	Today we're talking to our finalists for the west and southwest region.
0:27.8	That's the whole western side of the country, north to south, as it were.
0:32.3	And we've had entries from Bristol, from Manchester and the Northwest for that.
0:38.4	And I have with me judges for the region, our guest judges, who are, I'll invite them all to
0:46.2	talk a little bit about themselves in a moment, but in brief, they are Angela Lugar,
0:52.4	who has a long career in the retail and consumer-facing sectors.
0:59.3	She was chief executive of N. Brown, what used to be a traditional catalogue business that turned
1:05.5	into an e-commerce business.
1:07.8	She is a non-executive at New Look, the fashion business, which is going through all
1:12.0	the issues of the high street and the retail sector right now. And she's just become chairman of
1:18.0	another business called the Paintshed based in Edinburgh. We have Hugh Campbell, a veteran of our
1:25.7	award scheme from Manchester. Hugh is the founding and managing partner of GP Bullhound, the tech-facing investment bank, which operates in Manchester and London and Berlin, indeed. And next judge is Dawn Lee Wan-Poe, who is an executive director of Julius Baer, our sponsor.
1:49.8	So we've heard three presentations today.
1:52.5	We've got another presentation to come from another company that I'll talk about on the end of the podcast.
1:59.1	But first of all, I'll invite our judges to say a little bit about
2:02.6	themselves, but also about how they see business right now in pandemic conditions in their
2:09.5	sector and in their region. So Angela, give us a brief introduction of yourself.
2:14.6	Hello, thanks, Martin. Yeah, so I guess I've now got a portfolio career where I'm a
2:20.4	non-executive director on a number of boards, chairing a small board, as you said, at the
2:25.9	paint shed. It's really leveraging many years of experience working in consumer-facing businesses.
2:30.9	So I guess my functional specialism is marketing, sales, so commercial roles,
	...

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