Elizabeth Winter of African Agenda was the celebrated winner of the IAPCO Driving Excellence Innovation Award 2016, as announced at the impressive IMEX Gala Evening in Frankfurt. Corne Koch of Wesgro Convention Bureau was delighted to accept the award on Elizabeth’s behalf, presented by Jan Tonkin, IAPCO President.
Elizabeth’s award winning innovation was a “standing discussion”, a session, which took participants out of their comfort zones and brought them together to share ideas in a lively, structured discussion. Experiences and knowledge were shared and new ideas sparked, as all corners of the session topic were explored. The bonus connection of improved cognition and physical movement to strengthen learning, improve memory retrieval, and enhance motivation and morale was not missed by the participants who scored the sessions highly when surveyed post conference.
Elizabeth stated ‘Being innovative does not necessarily imply being an inventor, we suggest it implies assessing a situation, a need, an audience and crafting a concept in order to shape a solution. This is an example of that.’
The IAPCO Innovation Award, which is supported by IMEX, is in its third year and attracted excellent quality and varied submissions. Three finalists each created a video describing their innovation, presented to the audience of the IAPCO Annual Meeting in Dubai for the final vote. The results were very close and both runners-up deserve recognition for their innovative concepts: Susan Kilcoyn, Conference Partners International for Connect16; and Ziv Izackov, Kenes Group, for a technological innovation for ESPID 2016.
