View event at www.london.edu/realinnovationawards.

Since 2015, London Business School has hosted an annual celebration of business innovation as it really happens. We don’t just celebrate success – we recognise persistence, serendipity, stubbornness and reinvention.

Please join us online for this year’s awards event, live at 4 pm (GMT) on Thursday 10 December. Hosted by Julian Birkinshaw and Jeff Skinner, we will be announcing the winners and sharing some of their inspiring and unusual stories.

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, and indeed history has shown that many new products and services originate from adverse conditions such as wartime, economic crises and health emergencies. The centre-piece of the event will be a live discussion on Innovation in Adversity, which coincides with an award category we added this year as we find ourselves in extraordinary times when so much ingenuity is focused on mitigating and halting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jeff Skinner will host a fireside chat with Professor Birkinshaw and two of this year’s awards winners, to discuss why innovation seems to proliferate in times of crisis.

You will also hear from the Judges Choice winners and LBS Faculty sharing their insights on Innovating in Adversity.

PLEASE BOOK ONLY ONE TICKET PER PERSON. MULTIPLE BOOKINGS ON THE SAME NAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS WILL BE COUNTED AS ONE.

Please see outline timings below:

• 16.00 Event opens
• 16:03 Welcome by your hosts Julian Birkinshaw, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship; Faculty Director for Executive Education and Jeff Skinner, Executive Director of the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• 16:07 Announcing the winners
• 16:35 Faculty insights
• 16:40 Fireside chat on Innovation and Adversity

About the awards

The Real Innovation Awards aim to showcase the authentic, haphazard and exciting business of real innovation and to identify and celebrate those people and organisations who exemplify the way it really works.

The selected finalists have created a great new product or service in an unorthodox manner that highlights the sometimes serendipitous or surprising ways in which innovation really happens. Our finalists were drawn from over 500 impressive nominations, shortlisted and selected by the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (IIE) and a panel of experts for one of the six categories:

• Alexander Fleming Serendipity Award: Agromillora Group, bio-bean, Instabug, Invisibobble, Swiss Vault Systems
• Best Beats First Award: Bloom & Wild, BrewDog, Down Dog, Duolingo, Term Finance Holdings
• George Bernard Shaw Unreasonable Person Award: Tomilola Adejana (Bankly), Abbas Dayekh (OyaNow), Charles Macharia (Mash Foundation), Simon Mottram (Rapha), Alexander Rinke (Celonis), Sim Shagaya (uLesson)
• Harnessing the Winds of Change Award: Avataar.me, De Correspondent, Lemonade Insurance, Vault Platform
• If at First You Don’t Succeed Award: Arth, Field Intelligence, Perkbox, Segment, Swiggy
• Innovation in Adversity Award: Arçelik, Batec Mobility, Bit Source, Cheetah, Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals

Register now to find out more about the winners and their impressive stories.

Social media: Follow the awards here: #RealInnovationAwards and find us on Twitter @LBSEntrepreneur