Guest Speakers

Guest Speaker - Emma Jones

Founder, Enterprise Nation & Co Founder StartUp Britain

Emma Jones is founder of small business community Enterprise Nation www.enterprisenation.com and a co-founder of national campaign, StartUp Britain www.startupbritain.org. After successfully selling a first business, Emma launched Enterprise Nation in 2006 as a website for people starting a business from home. The company has since grown to offer books, kits, ebooks, events and funding to help anyone start and grow their own business and the community is now 75,000 plus members strong.

Emma is the author of a number of books including 'Spare Room StartUp', 'Working 5 to 9', 'Go Global' and 'The StartUp Kit' and in 2011 was a co-founder of national campaign, StartUp Britain. In June 2024 Emma was awarded an MBE for services to enterprise.

Guest Speaker - Rohan Silva

Senior Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister

Rohan Silva is Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister in UK. He was previously Senior Policy Adviser for the 2010 General Election and Economic Adviser to the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne. Prior to this, Rohan was a Policy Analyst at HM Treasury, the UK ministry of finance.

Rohan works across all areas of government policy, but has a particular passion for technology and innovation. He has led the development of key policies to improve the environment for enterprise in the UK, such as the EIS tax changes announced in Budget 2011, the Entrepreneur Visa, the Hargreaves Review of IP and the development of the Tech City cluster. Rohan is also driving the creative use of technology in government, for example through opening up government procurement, using crowdsourcing platforms to develop policy and setting government data free.

In September 2011, Rohan was appointed as a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is also a trustee of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Battersea Arts Centre, Entrepreneur First and the Citizenship Foundation, and serves on the advisory board of Nick Hornby's 'Ministry of Stories'.

The Awards Moderator - Stuart Rock

Founder & Editorial Director, Caspian Media

Stuart has been an award-winning business journalist and editor for the past 20 years. He is a co-founder and the editorial director of Caspian, the media company that owns the market-leading business titles Real Business and Real Deals.  

A former Periodical Publishers Association Editor of the Year, Stuart has also overseen the launch of the CBI’s monthly magazine Business Voice and the award-winning relaunch of Professional Engineering, the monthly membership magazine of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. A graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, Stuart was editor of Director magazine between 1989 to 1996. You can follow him @stuart_rock