FT Article: Queen's Awards for Enterprise
The UK has greater need than ever to draw on its talent to devise world-beating products and services and sell them across the globe.
This year’s winners of the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise demonstrate the breadth and depth of business achievement, whether exporting fertile chicken eggs for hatching or exploiting the latest advances in nanotechnology.
The 2011 list, published today to mark the Queen’s birthday, contains 156 business awards, including FTSE companies, subsidiaries of foreign-owned groups and private businesses. At its heart lie dozens of smaller companies whose achievements deserve wider recognition.
Innovation and exports are needed to drive the UK’s recovery from recession. The quality of the winners indicates that the ability is there, coupled with ambition to expand trade with emerging economies.
The awards demonstrate the UK’s strength in sectors from architecture and design to pharmaceuticals, medical, oil and gas, engineering, construction, tourism, law, media, printing, logistics and many others.
Winners include universities that have successfully marketed themselves to overseas students, as well as computer games developers, book and wine sellers, manufacturers and companies whose technological breakthroughs are firing their own business growth and that of others.
Other winning businesses range from enterprises with as few as three employees to such well-known names as Yeo Valley Farms, BBC Research and Development and The National Archive.
One company has won awards in both the International Trade and Innovation categories: RealVNC, which supplies remote access software for computers and mobile devices (see Page 2).
As in recent years, company awards are given for achievement in three categories: International Trade, where there are 102 winners; Innovation, with 44 awards; and sustainable development, with 10. The standard has been high, with 20 per cent of applicants receiving awards – double last year’s amount.
There are also 11 awards to individuals for efforts to encourage entrepreneurship, including a lifetime achievement award for Ronald Batty, former chief executive of CDC Enterprise Agency in Durham.
In the FTSE 100, there is an International Trade award for Icap, the interdealer broker founded by Michael Spencer, which operates in 32 countries.
ARM Holdings, the Cambridge chip designer whose products are in more than 90 per cent of mobile phones sold globally, wins an Innovation award for developing chips with low power consumption.
An Innovation award also goes to Smiths Detection, part of Smiths Group, for chemical agent detectors deployed by armed forces and security services.
From the FTSE 250, Renishaw, a Gloucestershire-based maker of precision measurement systems, wins an Innovation award for devising a system for detecting broken parts of machine tools. Volumatic, part of Halma group, wins one for making secure cash-handling equipment.
Other listed company winners include James Halstead, the Aim-traded commercial floor covering specialist, which receives an International Trade award.
The largest winner in terms of employment is the University of Manchester, with nearly 9,400 staff, which wins an International Trade award for doubling overseas income.
Also receiving awards for recruiting students globally are the University of Bedfordshire, City of London College and Middlesex University Higher Education Corporation.
Other large or well-known winners include Wates Group, the family owned construction company, which wins a Sustainable Development award, JC Bamford Excavators, which wins an Innovation award for a design that increases the efficiency of diggers, and Hyder, the engineering consultancy, which wins a trade award.
At the small end, Conwy Valley Systems, recognised in the Innovation category for developing a system for predicting rock properties, has three employees, as does Trident Sensors, developer of a remote tracking system, and Road Pals, which wins a Sustainable Development award for promoting greener commuting.
The oldest winner is RS Clare & Co, founded in Liverpool in 1748, the longest established company manufacturing lubricants in the UK. Having spawned the road marking industry in the first world war and pioneered modern thermoplastic roadmarking materials – in which it is still a leading force – it mainly makes specialist greases. It wins an International Trade award.
Foreign-owned groups are well represented, including two parts of Thales, the French defence technology group, which win International Trade awards. So do Haskoning UK, part of the Dutch engineering and consultancy group; GE Aircraft Engine Services, part of the US’s General Electric; Pandrol UK, a French-owned maker of railway fastenings; Axa PPP International, part of France’s Axa group; and LycoRed, an Israeli-owned maker of nutritional blends to fortify food.
Manufacturing has a broad range of winners, encouraging people who want to see an industrial revival to rebalance the economy.
The successful companies include Martin-Baker Aircraft, a maker of ejection seats and other survival systems, whose equipment is said to have saved 7,345 lives since 1949. It wins an International Trade award, as do Toby Churchill, which makes communication aids for those unable to speak, Portmeirion, the Stoke-based pottery group, and Dunlop Aircraft Tyres, based in Birmingham.
The list also includes winners from the creative industries, services and the new economy. Jagex, a Cambridge-based online games developer and publisher, wins an Innovation award for the development of RuneScape, its popular multiplayer game.
Igloo Books, a fast-growing publisher, wins an International Trade award: it publishes books for children and adults in 27 languages, and plans to expand.
BBC Research and Development and Red Bee Media share an Innovation award for developing a tool to analyse televised sport from any position, including where it would be impossible to place cameras.
The National Archives and Tessella, an Oxfordshire company, get an Innovation award for developing Safety Deposit Box, a system for preserving digital information that is used by libraries and archive organisations around the world.
Innovation award winners also include Harvard Engineering for a wireless street light management system and Linemark for a new method of marking sports pitches.
Winners of the Sustainable Development award include Yeo Valley Farms, the dairy business, Blue Skies, which sources fresh fruit from Africa, Naturesave Insurance, the green insurance provider, and ScottishPower Renewables, owned by Spain’s Iberdrola.
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