Suffolk University’s Center for Innovative Collaboration Leadership (CICL) and Imaginatik have chosen the winners of this year’s 2017 Collaborative Innovation Awards (CiA).
Each year, the awards honor one corporate and one non-profit “Innovation of the Year.” Dozens of qualified applications were submitted to the Sawyer Business School and its new partner Imaginatik, a Boston-based company that develops innovation management software. The entries were narrowed down to finalists in each category, and an awards show was held on May 11 in Sargent Hall.
“We were extremely pleased with the high quality of this year’s finalists and winners,” says Jodi Detjen, co-director of the Suffolk CICL. “Every year, our judges have a harder and harder time choosing the winners.”
And the winners are…
Corporate Innovation: EY
EY created the very successful workplace productivity app, “EY Engage.” It uses the power of crowdsourcing to pair project- and task-based needs with talent, expertise, and spare bandwidth across global organizations. Learn more.
Non-Profit Innovation: Interise
Interise recently expanded its local, regional and national StreetWise 'MBA'™ program, which is designed to provide capacity-building support to small business owners. Learn more.
The awards are a natural extension of the Center for Innovative Collaboration Leadership’s mission, which is to engage students, faculty, and partners in projects, research, and discussions advancing skills and understanding of collaborative innovation.
“We feel that it’s important to recognize the incredible collaborative solutions that are out there in profit and non-profit spaces,” says Detjen. “What it means to ‘collaborate’ and the process of collaboration is always evolving. It isn’t an easy task to accomplish successfully, so thought leaders should be acknowledged.”
Meet the Business School's new partner, Imaginatik
This marks the seventh year that the center has run a collaborative innovation awards program. But it is the first year of partnering with Imaginatik, which helps companies build innovation into a repeatable, scalable, and cost-effective enterprise discipline. As a result of the partnership, crowdsourcing software and methodologies now help run the Collaborative Innovation Awards competition.
“Imaginatik was pleased to join forces with Suffolk University to support this important awards program,” says Chris Townsend, CMO of Imaginatik. “We thank Suffolk CICL for its partnership and all the strong innovators who competed this year.”
The call for entries for the 2018 Collaborative Innovation Awards will begin in September.