BridgePoint Group’s Innovation Awards 2020

BridgePoint Group Innovation Awards 2020 – Supporting Business Innovation. 

Our passion for supporting business innovation and growth has not stopped in 2020. The 2020 Innovation Awards look to be more competitive than ever with seven companies looking to take out BridgePoint Group’s Innovation Award.

In this article, we look at three companies vying to take out the Innovation Award in 2020. Those companies are Oyster Shade, Tarkine and Citotop. We will also profile the third member of the judging panel, Alan Baghdasarayan and the criteria which will ultimately decide this year’s Innovation Award winner. We will also check in with a previous Innovation Award winner, 24 Hour Positioning. 

Let’s look at a new player in a massive market, Tarkine. 

Tarkine, for recycling runners

Named after the majestic Tarkine Rainforest in Tasmania, Tarkine is a proudly Australian owned and operated company who are on a mission to create the world’s most eco-friendly running shoe.

Traditional running shoes take centuries to fully decompose. Tarkine is embarking upon a journey of R&D to develop a runner that is made using a combination of recycled and/or compostable materials. They have so far been successful in developing various new technologies, and plan to launch the brand during the first half of 2021.

Furthermore, Tarkine aims to take responsibility for the full life cycle of their shoes. Every shoe will be shipped with a return postage paid mailbag (100% compostable bag), so when you’re finished with the runner, you can mail it back and have them completely recycle your old runner at a specialist facility, at the company’s cost.

Tarkine are pioneers in ensuring social, corporate, and ethical responsibility in a market that is dominated by big brands.

As co-founder Sam Burke states “Hundreds of millions of running shoes end up in landfill every year. Some of their components can take upwards of 1000 years to decompose. Tarkine is looking to take on that responsibility by being responsible for each shoe that we produce. Basically, creating a life cycle of a shoe. From sourcing materials from eco-friendly suppliers right through to working with recyclers to break down the carbon footprint of the shoes once we get them back after their life of running.”

Sam has extensive experience in running, a former elite middle-distance runner, he also co-founded Runners Tribe in 2008 with his business partner, and marathoner, Ross Johnson. It is one of the world’s largest running websites and has over 70,000 Facebook followers.

Next is CitoTop.

Citotop, switching the way we sit

Citotop started its operations as a top-rated seller on eBay. Since then, Citotop has commenced a journey of R&D to bring to users its innovative Switch Chair.

The Switch Chair is a simple idea, but complex to engineer. Citotop aims to bring to market a completely modular chair that can have either the backrest or seat switched (i.e. flipped around) to provide the user with different textures, materials, and style of chair depending on the occasion.

And the last in this group of nominations is:

The Oyster Shade, for brilliantly lighting up Australia

Ugly lights in your house? The Oyster Shade has come up with a brilliant solution. The solution is to help people redecorate oyster light fittings with a simple cosmetic fix. Using the existing oyster light as the base, the bespoke shade is simply clipped in at the ceiling rim using magnets. It attaches a new wireframe structure over the light with a shade of your choice. All this without the need for a single tool.

 The Oyster Shade is proud of its solution. The solution is technically complex to achieve from an engineering perspective.

Let’s see who the judges are and what criteria they assess.

Over the past two Innovation Award articles, we have introduced Tony Shaw – Principal Patent Attorney at international law firm Allens and Marco Tallarida, Strategic Director of B. Product.

Today, we introduce the third member of the judging panel, BridgePoint Group’s own Alan Baghdasarayan. 

Alan heads up BridgePoint Group Innovation Advisory division. His passion is working with clients to maximise the complex world of R&D Tax incentives. Alan brings a very specialised knowledge-set to not only the judging panel but to BridgePoint clients as well. 

Criteria

The judging criteria are based on technical merit, social good and commercial potential. 

• Technical Merit: What is under development and how it differs from existing solutions?
• Commercial Potential: What is the growth potential and target market for the company’s innovation?
• Social Good: How does the solution make a positive impact on society?

Other considerations are the extent that each nominee stretches the traditional thinking and applies innovation to solve or meet an unmet demand or problem. The development, implementation and use of new systems, technology, processes and the ‘smarts’ behind them. This covers clever, imaginative and original thinking. 

Looking at a past winner – 24 Hour Positioning

24 Hour Positioning is a Sydney-based company that is on a mission to provide postural management solutions and encourage participation, increase comfort and improve the quality of life of those that have a mobility-related disability. 24 Hour Positioning is a company that cares across a wide range of initiatives and they have promoted “Move for Men’s Health” on their social media pages for November 2020. Movember focuses on mental health and suicide prevention in Men.

24 Hour Positioning is a company that continues to strive for comfort for anyone, especially those living with a disability. They are an occupational therapy service with a person-centred approach to protect and restore body shape. 24 Hour Positioning aims to identify how that changing the equipment that you sit and lie on will improve the quality of your life. Currently, 24 Hour Positioning is working on the design and development of a new end-to-end solution that provides people with mobility-related disabilities with the proper positioning required for 24 hours a day.

Look out for further updates around BridgePoint Groups 2020 Innovation Awards in the near future. Here are previous nominees in the 2020 Innovation Awards.

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Alan Baghdasarayan

GOVERNMENT GRANTS & INCENTIVES DIRECTOR

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