A long-established management college and a fast-growing company founded just five years ago were among the Oxfordshire winners of this year's Queen's Awards for Enterprise.

Oxford Diffraction, which employs 18 people at its Milton Park office and another 45 in Poland, has increased its exports in three years by more than 150 per cent to more than £4m, and took a prize for export achievement.

The company makes X-ray diffraction equipment for studying the atomic and molecular structure of chemicals, drugs and proteins.

The machines built in Poland are used in the fields of drug design, geology, physics, and chemistry.

Achieving the export growth has involved extensive overseas travel and the appointment of many distributors.

Finance director Kevin Aubrey said: "Our selling point is that our machine is low maintenance and relatively service-free."

He added: "Oxfordshire was the ideal base for us, thanks to our connection with Oxford Instruments.

"Obviously, its proximity to the universities is helpful, though its proximity to Heathrow and Birmingham airports is less helpful to us than to some, because many of our flights take off from Stansted."

Henley Management College, in contrast, was founded in 1945. It too has won an award for export achieve- ment. In the past six years, it has increased overseas revenue by nearly 50 per cent to £11m a year.

The principal of the college, Christopher Bones, has led a team of 268 employees to establish a network of representatives in dozens of countries. Now students come to the college from more than 100 countries.

The college also runs its own successful distance learning masters degree course over the Internet.

The Queen's Award for Enterprise Promotion, awarded for the first time this year in the South East, went to Peter Westgarth, for 15 years chief executive of Young Enterprise, which has its national headquarters in Cowley, Oxford.

It encourages local firms to provide advisors to help teams of school pupils set up their own companies and "learn by doing."

Mr Westgarth, 52, who left Young Enterprise last year, said: "I started as a teacher and then found that I could draw young people out by teaching business principles."