7th Economist Innovation Awards - winners announced

The Economist awards’ ceremony celebrates the achievements and innovations of individuals who have positively transformed global business with their commitment to new ideas and creativity.

“If we don’t innovate, we stagnate” was the message from UK Trade & Investment Chief Executive Andrew Cahn. In his keynote speech Cahn stressed how important it is in difficult times to support R&D so that the UK can keep its place as the “innovation nation”.

The awards were as follows:

• Bioscience: Sir Martin Evans, Director of the School of Biosciences and Professor of Mammalian Genetics, Cardiff University, for his work on stem-cell research, “knockout” mice, and gene targeting.

• Energy and the Environment: Arthur Rosenfeld, Commissioner, California Energy Commission, for his work as an energy efficiency pioneer.

• Social and Economic: Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, Co-chairs and Trustees, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for their development of a philanthropic support platform, including support for immunisation and literacy projects.

• Computing and Telecommunications: Matti Makkonen, Telecommunications Consultant, former Executive Vice-president, Sonera, for his work on Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging.

• Consumer Products and Services: Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, Co-founders, YouTube, for their work developing Multi-media content sharing.

• Business Process: Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia for public collaboration as a form of product and content development.

• “No Boundaries”: Sumio Iijima, Professor, Meijo University, Senior Research Fellow, NEC, for his development of carbon nanotube

• Corporate use of innovation: Nokia, in recognition of its innovative culture and rapid response to new consumer trends.

The UK winner this year is Sir Martin Evans, the Director of the School of Biosciences and Professor of Mammalian Genetics at Cardiff University, who is widely acclaimed as the father of stem cell research. He is known as the creator of “knockout” mice which are used to model human diseases. Along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, Sir Evans is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2007, for a technique called "gene targeting", which they used to introduce modified genes into mice.

Commenting on his award in the category of Social and Economic, Bill Gates said: “Melinda and I are honoured to receive The Economist’s Social and Economic Innovation Award. The foundation is working to foster new approaches to innovation to improve the human condition, whether through finding a better way to educate people, grow crops, or develop a new medicine to cure a disease. We thank The Economist for recognising innovation in all its forms.”

The foundation is working to foster new approaches to innovation to improve the human condition

Bill Gates

The Economist’s Annual Innovation Awards Ceremony and Summit is sponsored by UK Trade & Investment, Grant Thornton and Project Management Institute (PMI).

UKTI is proud to support innovation and this year’s awards proved again that the UK is the place to do business for innovators. UK has world-class universities, supportive regulation and a highly skilled workforce. This means that the country is able to produce over 5% of the world’s research from just 1% of its population.

The UK has carefully built an environment for innovation that is perhaps the most welcoming in the world. The country offers:

• immediate access to world-class universities and institutions

• regulation that breaks down barriers to research

• robust intellectual property protection and

• continually improving workforce skills with experts at the cutting-edge of their field