Guest speaker announced for Innovation Excellence Awards

Print Solutions

The Stationer’s Company has unveiled the guest presenter for the 2025 Innovation Excellence Awards, where the best of the communications and content industries will be announced.

Dr Vanessa Lawrence started her career as the geography, geology, agriculture and veterinary science publisher for tertiary education at Longman Group which today is known as Pearson. During that time, she was awarded a Scholarship from The Stationers’ and Newspaper Makers’ Company for a project to further management and technological skills in the industry.

Vanessa now has over 35 years’ experience in the digital data community and has specialised in geographical information and space applications. From 2000 to 2014, Vanessa was the director general and CEO of Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping authority. She was the first woman to lead the organisation in over 200 years and eventually was the longest serving director general since 1875.

From 2011 to 2015, she was the founding co-chair of the United Nations Committee on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) – this was the first new ‘official’ Committee formed within the United Nations, since the early 1990s. Today, UN-GGIM is globally, the lead policy organisation working in geographical information.

As the owner of Location International, she and her team have been working internationally for the last 10 years as senior advisors to governments, inter-governmental organisations and large private sector organisations as to how they can benefit from improving their own use of location information, including data generated from space.

The winners will be announced at a champagne reception and lunch on 17 October 2025, at Stationer’s Hall in London.

The 2024 award winners.

Through the awards, the Stationers’ Company recognises the key role the communications and content industries play in the UK economy, highlights outstanding innovation in the sector and offers the opportunity to share best practice.

Vida Barr-Jones and Kate Howell, the awards co-chairs, said: ‘It is a privilege to welcome Dr Vanessa Lawrence to the Innovation Excellence Awards ceremony this year, as we celebrate the eleventh year of the awards.

‘Innovation is a vital means for organisations to remain relevant, competitive, and responsive in their respective industries and we want to celebrate it. We want to extend a huge congratulations to all the shortlisted brands and companies – they should be very proud of themselves and the ceremony will be made even more special by the attendance of such an inspirational trailblazer in her field.’