Steve Lindsey is President and Chief Executive of SFL Technology, a Coventry-based company focused on bringing advanced engineering thinking and technology adoption to the logistics and enterprise software industries. He is an inventor and entrepreneur with a track record of identifying where established industries have failed to move with the times and building the solutions that change them.

The best illustration of that is Lontra. Without a formal engineering background, Steve holds a chemistry degree, he designed the Blade Compressor, the first genuinely new compressor design in more than 80 years and up to 20 per cent more efficient than traditional technology. He had been reading about the history of the engine when he discovered that 10 per cent of all industrial electricity used in Europe goes through compressors, and that almost no fundamental progress had been made in the field for decades. He founded Lontra in Napton, Warwickshire in 2004 to commercialise the invention.

The commercial path from that invention was as challenging as the technical one. Lontra grew from a two-person intellectual property licensing business to a manufacturer, securing a landmark agreement with Swiss multinational Sulzer worth approximately £600 million to supply Blade Compressors to wastewater treatment plants. The company also received funding from Innovate UK, the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme and the Carbon Trust. In 2017, Steve was shortlisted for the European Patent Office's European Inventor Award in the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises category, one of just 15 finalists chosen from 600,000 active patents filed across Europe.

The same instinct that drove him to reinvent the compressor, the conviction that industries built on assumptions they rarely question are exactly where the most significant opportunities live, now shapes his work at SFL Technology. He is a natural problem solver, a motorsport enthusiast and a champion of British technical research and development.