Matt Johnson was raised by entrepreneurs — his parents founded Denver-based landscape architecture practice Civitas — but he had no intention of creating a company himself. That was until, as part of his industrial design degree at London’s Royal College of Art, he invented conductive paint, with which he could create working electrical circuits on walls.

Now, Johnson is chief executive of Bare Conductive, a business formed around his product employing 10 people in a studio in Shoreditch, the east London tech start-up hub. The company has generated revenue of over ￡2.5m in six years of trading, selling its paint in kits through hobbyist websites and retail chains such as RadioShack in the US. Johnson is in discussions with several FTSE 100 companies about taking operations to a much larger scale.

Many inventors like Johnson try to turn their innovations into businesses, but few reach a large scale. More often it is companies led by entrepreneurs, rather than inventors, that change society with their products.