innovation awards

Last night we announced the winners of our Innovation Awards for 2012, which celebrate the best examples of innovation in digital marketing and e-commerce from the past year.

These included Debenhams, Tesco, first direct, Vodafone and bmibaby, while Redweb took home the award for most innovative digital agency for the second time in a row.

Econsultancy will be hosting our 2012 Innovation Awards at the Park Lane Hilton in London this evening.

In the run-up to the glittering award ceremony, we’ve been speaking to our shortlisted candidates to get their take on all aspects of innovation in business.

We’ve looked at fostering the right kind of environment to get those ideas flowing, budgeting make sure plans don’t impact your bottom line, and looked back at some great ideas to help get you inspired.

Of course, even a great idea can be outdone. The industry has never advanced as quickly as it does today, with some truly awe-inspiring ideas rolling out every day.

With all this competition to factor in, we thought we’d close our series by asking our nominees about keeping ahead of the innovation curve.

As we learned in our previous post, our Innovation Awards shortlist candidates all thought that an ability to learn from past mistakes was just as important as a vision of the future when trying to advance your business.

It’s not always mistakes we learn from though, and business innovation is as much about evolution as revolution.

Today we’re asking our expert panel which companies, products and ideas from the past have truly inspired them, and which ones they wished they’d had a hand in…

This month we’ve been posting regularly on the subject of innovation as a prelude to our annual Innovation Awards on February 23rd.  

We’ve been asking our shortlisted candidates for their opinions on every aspect of innovation in business, from identifying innovative ideas and people to scaling projects at multi-national level.

Today, we thought it would be useful to hone in on one particular business and gather their responses to our list of innovation-themed questions.  

Sissie Hsiao is group product manager at Google Analytics, a company which has based its reputation and success on doing things differently from the very start. We asked for her opinions on a variety of topics, and on the awards themselves.

Yesterday we spoke about the business imperatives behind innovation. We know that in today’s fast-paced market it’s important to evolve if you want to get ahead, but just how easy is this?

While start-ups are often built on revolutionary ideas, creating something truly new is a much tougher challenge for larger companies.

With levels of bureaucracy, procedures and red-tape to cut through, just how viable is it for a multinational to make a real change to its existing business model or introduce something new to market?

As it turns out, it’s extremely possible! Just look at Google and Apple. Of course, those are companies built around innovation from the ground up. But what about those with more traditional organisational structures?

We turned once more to our extensive panel of innovation experts…