A Look at the Shortlist Nominees for the Born Digital Wine Awards' Innovation Award by Vinventions

As the Born Digital Wine Awards come to its final stages for this year with some incredible shortlisted entries, we are compelled to share how the Innovation Awards entries went.

According to the Business Dictionary, Innovation is “The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products. In business, innovation often results when ideas are applied by the company in order to further satisfy the needs and expectations of the customers.”

Vinventions is not new to the world of innovation. We explore new innovative technologies and materials that push forward the wine closures market worldwide. We live and breathe innovation in everything we do, from research and development to market launch; this has always been the driving force for the continuous success of our company. We understand what disruption means and how it impacts business in an industry that is slower than others to accept and adopt innovative concepts, products or technologies.

Being innovative means staying ahead of times; it also means having a mindset that does not necessarily fit current worldviews but caters for the future ones. It is about bringing new solutions to old problems with new insights and experience.

We also believe that innovation goes beyond business, and its sole purpose should be to bring positive change to our society. Innovators take risks, and those that create revolutionary products, services, or technologies take on the most significant risk because they create new markets.

We take pride in contributing to the wine industry’s sustainable developments with our innovations and want to facilitate more of it across the wine sector, let that be economical, environmental, or social innovation.

Being innovative means staying ahead of times; it also means having a mindset that does not necessarily fit current worldviews but caters for the future ones. It is about bringing new solutions to old problems with new insights and experience.

For the evaluation of the Born Digital Wine Awards’ Innovation Award, we considered four criteria:

• The concept: We looked for innovations that not only address a need and solve a problem but also seize an opportunity and/or create a new market space.
• The value: We evaluated the need/desire, differentiation, cost, and advantage of the project. We assessed how the innovation satisfies an existing need or how it creates a new demand that is not currently available in the market. We looked for evidence of how the offering is different and whether it has distinct, game-changing advantages over any alternatives.
• The delivery: We looked at the story, engagement, availability and achievement of the project. That is how the message and broader story of the innovation are communicated in clear and compelling ways.
• The impact: Sustainability, social responsibility and potential of the projects were the main focus for this criterion. We wanted to understand the short- and long-term impact the innovation has on the business, the environment and society as a whole. We also considered how the offering might establish a vision or be the basis of a more extensive system or platform of innovations and how it might be an inspiration to future innovation and innovators.

It is with these eyes that we looked at and evaluated all the entries for the Innovation Awards and selected five entries that stood out more in terms of our criteria. In alphabetical order:

• A Balanced Glass: “The strength of A Balanced Glass lies in a collective belief that people who choose to work with beverage alcohol deserve to have the information they need to make informed decisions to manage their own long-term health and wellbeing,” says Rebecca Hopkins, founder of A Balanced Glass. At Vinventions we believe that Rebecca’s initiative, launched a year ago, has real breakthrough potential because it pokes the bear while creating a community that enrolls and participates in topics that our industry is late in addressing.
• Enolytics: The commitment to bring big data to the wine industry is what drives Enolytics. At Vinventions we believe in the power of data and actively support the notion that wine consumers and the industry need to be better connected. Bringing data into the wine world is essential, and Enolytics pushes the boundaries with their desire to transform winery decision-making processes with data.
• Robert Joseph: As someone who has pushed innovation since the early ‘80s, Robert Joseph needs little introduction. He is the most well-known challenger of the conservative wine world and relentlessly pushes it to look at itself and the world differently. He has a clear vision of what the future of wine will look like and will continue to rattle the cage, as he puts it, until others raise their heads above the parapet. Robert’s mindset and attitude toward innovation are very close to how Vinventions sees innovation in the wine industry.
• VINEX: The VINEX Exchange is a web-based trading platform for bottled and bulk wines and grapes, allowing B2B trading sector to connect globally in real time. VINEX’s effort to democratize the traditional trade operations by helping sellers and buyers with equal access will advance the industry's growth and provide more opportunities for more producers across more markets. Being in the B2B sector of the wine industry, at Vinventions we fully embrace projects that bring innovative solutions to old problems. Accessibility, connectedness and transparency coupled with efficient processes have an incredible ability to bring change into B2B operations.
• Wine2Wine: With the purpose to help Italian wine producers leverage new technological tools and digital media to develop their businesses both nationally and internationally, Wine2Wine stands out for how they take education and training to the next level. At Vinventions we believe in the power of education to broaden the views and to help the industry see the future.

The winner will be announced together with all the other category winners.

Beyond these five submissions, we would like to thank all projects submitted. They have been truly inspirational to read and to watch. They represent the willingness to differ, to be ahead of the times, and we encourage each one of you to continue pursuing this distinctiveness. The concepts, the formats and the hard work you have all put into it show and this is precisely what we believe the wine industry should strive to do more.