Presenting the award on Thursday (20 May), Kodak's regional director John O'Grady praised Heseltine's achievements since 1957 when he formed the company that grew into a £270m global media group employing around 2,000 people.

Haymarket is also the UK's largest privately-owned publisher. He described the company as "a publishing powerhouse with influence in many industries." PrintWeek is among Haymarket's business-to-business media interests.

Lord Heseltine said his first connection with Kodak was using a Box Brownie camera in the late 1940s: "I never thought some 60 years later I would get a Kodak lifetime achievement award!"

Speaking about the extraordinary transformation of both Kodak and Haymarket's industries, Lord Heseltine stated: "Kodak in its giant world and we in Haymarket's world believe in quality of product. Quality was the stamp of what we tried to do."

"People say ‘is the printed word finished?' I personally don't believe it is," he stated. "If you stand back and look at the world – because today the world is the marketplace for anybody entrepreneurial – the opportunities are there.

"It is self-evident that digitalisation is transforming the capacity to extend knowledge and make it available in an infinite variety of forms. I am an inveterate optimist and I see the most extraordinary opportunities."