Innovator of the Year Awards: Sustainability and Social Purpose

Every year, The Spectator travels the country in search of the best and boldest new companies that are disrupting their respective industries. In a series of five podcasts, we will tell you about the finalists for 2023’s Innovator of the Year Awards, sponsored by Investec. The awards winners will be announced in a prize ceremony in November.

This episode showcases the finalists in the Sustainability and Social Purpose category. These businesses all want to make the world a better place – whether that’s through helping reduce our emissions or giving back to the local community. They believe that business isn’t just for profit, but for a purpose.

Martin Vander Weyer, The Spectator’s business editor, judges the awards and hosts this podcast along with three other judges: Eva-Maria Dimitriadis, CEO of The Conduit Connect, which connects businesses with an eye to social and environmental impact with investors and mentors; Clive Bawden, chief operations officer of Warwick Music Group, a company that makes affordable instruments made from plastic and a former winner of the Innovator of the Year Awards; and Michelle White, co-head of Investec’s private office.

The finalists in this category are:

• Coracle, which provides digital education to prisoners.
• Beam, which supports homeless and other disadvantaged people to get jobs, homes and skills.
• Agricarbon, which provides affordable and accurate soil carbon audits in aid of regenerative farming.
• Aqua Metrology Systems Ltd, which provides water monitoring to local municipalities, to ensure their water is safe.
• Sunamp, which uses patented ‘heat batteries’ to store heat produced by heat pumps, instead of water tanks.
• Celtic Renewables, which produces sustainable chemicals from unwanted wastes and residues.
• CeraPhi, which uses the earth’s heat, accessible from end-of-life oil and gas wells, to produce clean energy.
• NatureSpace Partnership Ltd, which helps housing developers and local authorities check for newts, a protected species, in proposed sites for building.