Last week on Wednesday 11th November at the Vinopolis in London’s Borough Market, more than 300 people from Europe’s most creative, disruptive and entrepreneurial businesses attended the 2015 Corporate Entrepreneur Awards. It is essentially a showcase of how large corporates bust the myth that only nimble startups can in fact be agile, innovative and take risks. You might remember we wrote about the awards recently here.
So we thought it would be a great opportunity to dust off our thinking caps and get involved by partnering with consultants Market Gravity and celebrating the best and brightest behind the innovations.
I had the pleasure of being part of the judging process alongside seven others from various companies and together we discovered just how the most diverse industries are disrupting their fields through the use of innovative technology – it was quite a list to judge from!
The winners of this year’s categories were:
- New product or service
Winner: Ribgy and Peller, for their 3D Mirror
- New business launch
Winner: The LEGO Group for their Future Labs
- Best innovation culture
Winner: Pearson PLC, for their One Pearson Global Product Lifecycle. “the product lifecycle team was set up to support Pearson’s transition from a portfolio of companies to a portfolio of products and to create a single culture focused on common processes, ways of working, data and taxonomy in order to drive that transition.”
- Best game changer
Winner: Castrol, for “Nexcel, a new revolutionary technology that marks one of the most significant oil change innovations in automotive history”.
As the lead judge for the “New product and service” category I have to say the winner Rigby and Peller was – for most people – an unexpected choice. However, looking closer into the solution and the use of the technology, it is a very impressive and extremely elegant solution. They created a product that changes completely the experience of their customers and aims to fix an ongoing problem, while remaining honest to their brand.
The attendees of the event also had the opportunity to vote for their favourite company amongst all the finalists for the Innovator’s Choice Awards. The quite sophisticated anonymous voting system consisted of Duplo blocks:
Simple, but effective!
The winner of the special award was Barclaycard, for bPay, enabling users to do fast, secure contactless payments with their mobile.
During the event itself Cisco had a TechZone featuring three brand new demos from three very different area of the business with innovation at the core:
Collaboration: Workforce Transformation. As we were hosted at the Vinopolis, we thought it appropriate to stream in a remote wine connoisseur using our cutting edge collaboration technology, featuring DX80’s and a MX300. This is how you can build a next-generation workforce.
A prototype Internet of Everything User Experience project now available on Cisco DevNet. This platform is loaded onto a smart watch to connect machine -> machine -> human. With so many things being connected, how do we make it useful to the wearer? What commercial possibilities does it possess?
A project funded through InnovateUK driven from our Cisco CREATE team, and partners such as Telent and Bronze Labs, to create the PoC of the next generation station and address address the connectivity demands of four groups: security providers, train operators, retailers and passengers.
All in all a very interesting day and a huge amount of tech, gadgets projects to keep an eye on – watch this space.
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