While I have served on the Irish Times Innovation Awards judging panel before now, this year’s awards was my first experience of chairing the panel. I was delighted to accept the invitation to do so – as I have always got a buzz out of innovation. Over the years, I have filed more than 100 patent applications for things that impact people’s lives around the world.
The entries were of an exceptional standard this year and it is no exaggeration to say that in several of the categories all three shortlisted companies could easily have won.
That made our task as judges a very tough one. We were fortunate to have a very strong judging panel who were able to ask the right questions to allow the entrants to tell their stories. After that, it was a question of the panel sitting down to decide which were the most deserving in the categories – and that was no easy task given the extremely high quality of the entries.
Innovation is all about asking if something can be done better in an area that matters. That was the common thread running through the companies shortlisted for this year’s awards. PMD Solutions, the overall winner, developed a motion-tolerant respiratory monitoring device that can detect a change in a patient’s breathing before it becomes a problem.
Meanwhile, ID-Pal has created an identity verification system that will be very useful for people like bank customers living in remote locations. Then there is Avatar, with its advanced virtual reality technology, while GlasPort Bio has come up with a way of significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
I often describe innovation as like baking a cake and taking the ingredients and putting them together in a new way to create something different that customers are interested in buying. That’s what all the companies who were shortlisted for this year’s awards are doing. You can have the best idea in the world, but if someone is not interested in buying it you won’t be successful. I have no doubt that all of this year’s finalists will be successful in the years ahead.
