For a man who has lost count of the number of patents to his name and who has helped build and transform multiple products and businesses, Paul Davis left school at 16 with a record distinguished only by the fact that it was unremarkable.

“I was just jogging along. I didn’t have a hunger to stretch myself or achieve anything,” he recalls. “I joined Unilever in 1965 as a mediocrity in a role as a lab technician at the lowest level possible, which has since been eliminated.”

Yet over the following three decades, he launched pioneering health products such as Clearblue, the simple pregnancy test that has been used globally since 1988. The broader applications of the underlying lateral flow technology he jointly developed to simple at-home “point of care” diagnostics have since had widespread impact, not least in the coronavirus kit produced by his company Mologic.