Romania Insider Awards 2018: The winners of the Best Innovation Award powered by Bayer

The Romania Insider Awards event series is part of Romania-Insider.com's #PositiveRomania movement, meant to uncover role models and game changers in Romania, while highlighting sustainability, fair-play and ethics in business. The first edition of the event revealed jury prize and public prize winners in seven categories, as well as the recipient of an award chosen by the young generation of professionals.

This Best Innovation Award powered by Bayer recognized excellence in innovation in any field: research & development, IT&C, business development, human resources, marketing, product development. The awarded innovation should be substantial and meaningful for the Romanian market, potentially also for international markets. Who was eligible? Companies or individuals with at least one innovative project, product, service, process, irrespective of their size. Time of launch: 2017 or 2018.

Judging criteria

• Proven positive impact, local and/or international.
• Practicality, ease of use & scalability of the innovation.
• Level & constancy of innovation within the company — constant use of innovation with positive results will be a tie-break for companies with similar scores.

In the first judging round, the Board of Advisors made of 12 heads of business organizations and business consultants reviewed and offered their scores for the 24 eligible nominations received in this category. The three highest ranked projects became the finalists for the Jury Prize. The Jury made of seven Romanian and foreign CEOs then decided in an hours-long judging round, which of these projects should receive the award. In this category, neither the Board of Advisors, nor the Jury knew the real names of companies or projects when assigning scores. Jury prize finalists ClarK are AR (Augmented Reality) industrial smart glasses especially developed for the automotive, logistics & oil & gas industries. The smart glasses can provide employees more security and efficiency within the working process by simply localizing and identifying errors digitally in the process. ClarK is built by serial innovators who are driven by bringing technological and social progress in our country. Their USP are the embedded sensors and modular design, which allows for tailor-made solutions, instead of an out-of-the-box product. „We believe Romania has untapped technological potential and we are here to prove that innovation is possible in Romania and to show how it looks like, done by students for global companies