Innovation
Issue No. 51 - February/March 2010
SA’s economic future rests with Top 20
The Top 20 SA Innovation Awards have brought together SA’s 20 most influential business-to-business innovations of the 21st Century. Sydac leads a field where ranking has been judged according to disruptive effect. All Top 20 finalists have rewritten the rule book in their sectors.
Bruce M. Linn, respected IT innovator, entrepreneur and company director, was inaugural Chairman of Judges for the T20 Awards. Bruce says the program attracted an exceptional field of participants and is providing “overdue” recognition for the entrepreneurs who do so much to develop SA’s industrial capacity and reputation.
“We’ve been very focussed on more established industries, which is appropriate, but innovation has not been recognised adequately,” Bruce says,noting innovative entrepreneurs accept setup risk,“putting everything on the line in taking innovation to commercial reality”.
A quarter of the T20 finalists are IT innovators but that sector aside, the field is astonishingly broad. South Australians are innovating in transport, surveying and mapping, power conservation and reticulation, water optimisation, robotics and one enterprise has revived an ancient source of fibre for paper and building products. “Judging the Top 20 was challenging, in the first place because such a wide variety of entries in many different fields made it difficult to compare them according to the criteria. Secondly, the quality of the entries was very high,” Bruce says.<...
