Innovation Excellence Awards: Earth Island commended for creative communication

Print Solutions

The Stationers’ Company announced the winners of this year’s Innovation Excellence Awards at its luncheon and exhibition of entries at Stationers’ Hall on 20 June. Now in their fourth year, the awards attracted entries from the printing, printing supplies, publishing, packaging, office products, promotion and communication sectors.

Overall Innovator of the Year went to the Publishers Licensing Society, which also won the new Digital Technology Application category, for its PLS Permissions, a service powered by PLSclear automating permissions and payment to re-use extracts from published content. The technology impressed the judges as it fills a major gap in the publishing market and represents a clear evolution of rights management into a field suggested by the Hargreaves Report.

Winners of the individual categories were:

Social Development: Calibre Audio Library, a national charity, for its CALdownload, an app that will transform access to books for those with sight difficulties.

Business Development: Dennis Publishing for sustaining a publishing business by successfully linking printed and internet magazine titles to a trading app.

Creative Communication: Hobs Group for its time sequencing 3D printing technology to facilitate the communication of complex building programmes to non-specialist stakeholders.

Novel Manufacturing: Müller Martini for InfiniTrim, an innovative three-knife trimmer able to handle up to 2000 book per hour in print run or single book mode with zero setup time.

Designs for Retail Markets: Parkside Flexibles for a new recloseable share bag that represents a step change in packaging and is ideal for the snack market.

Earth Island (that’s us folks!) was highly commended in the Creative Communication category for Print Solutions, ‘a dynamic magazine giving physical examples of what print and paper can do’, while Ultimate Digital was highly commended in the Designs for Retail Markets for its use of digital technology to deliver personalised packaging linked to a social media campaign.

Peter Day, former BBC business correspondent and a member of the judging panel, said at the event: ‘When it comes to innovation, the light bulb moment is just the start of a laborious process of getting the idea into production and then into the marketplace.’

Tony Mash, chairman of the Stationers’ Company Industry Committee, who organises the annual Awards, said: ‘The main sources of innovation this year have been the exploitation of digital technologies, including examples of personalisation and collaborative development.’