Let’s remind ourselves what we mean by ‘disruptor’. A truly disruptive business revolutionises its marketplace by delivering radical improvements in choice, price and accessibility. A disruptor may be a boffin or a bold lateral thinker: Henry Ford did not invent the motorcar any more than Airbnb invented the ‘homestay’, but both created systems that made the product cheaper and more available than ever before — and both count as great disruptors.
But these days ‘disruptor’ status is claimed by all manner of ventures. So in choosing our shortlist for the Award sponsored by Julius Baer, we had to sort the original from the derivative and distinguish those that are already delighting customers from those that are still testing concepts. Overall, however, we’ve been hugely impressed — and the entries tell us much about the UK’s distinctive strengths in innovation.
It came as no shock that their distribution was weighted towards London, simply because that’s where the UK’s biggest clusters of start-ups and capital happen to be.
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