Disruptor

For the grand finale of the second year of our Economic Disruptor Awards, sponsored by Julius Baer, we returned to the same atmospheric science-fiction venue: London’s Postal Museum at Mountpleasant, with its still-working Mail Rail miniature underground train that, until 2003, shuttled sacks of letters between the capital’s major sorting offices.
 
Imagine it as a scale model of HS2 and tell us what you think of that whole blighted project, said Spectator chairman Andrew Neil in his prize-giving speech. Imagine it as a time machine that could show us the role of the economic disruptor down the centuries, I said in my own welcoming remarks: if it could take us back to the Stone Age, we’d probably find primitive tribes warring over superstitions that history would forget — but we might also find a geek in a cave thinking, ‘What if I made the wheels on the cart round instead of square?’. He or she is the disruptor who’s trying to make a better world, and whose work will live on…
 
If that was the evening’s only oblique Brexit-and-election reference from the platform, it was a blessed and convivial relief to be talking about the positive achievements of entrepreneurs instead of the antics of our current crop of politicians. Faced with almost 150 entries this year, our judging panel (below) faced a formidable task in deciding which were the true disruptors among the many, for example, who talked about the power of ‘big data’ — while also having to make comparisons between ventures in niche products from e-bikes to dating sites and eco-toilets. But what we liked about all of them was the passionate intensity; the perfectionism; the willingness to pivot and try again if the product wasn’t perfect first time round; and more noticeable this year than last, the millennial focus on the idea that business should always have a wider social purpose as well as a profit motive.