Awards

I was sitting on the toilet. I realised that toilet paper has seen little to no innovation in the last 50 years. I also realised that global sanitation is a huge problem that is underfunded because people don’t like talking about toilets. In a split second the idea was born: toilet paper that uses 50% of its profits to build toilets in the developing world.

A good client asked for a unique team-building program that would enhance the team's ability to think creatively, collaborate towards a result that created a legacy, embedded the team's purpose and values and led to a deep level of understanding between team members. I combined my corporate team-building experience with my songwriting and recording capability and designed the team song experience.

My innovation was hatched after fitting yet another misaligned shower tray. This time I was doing a renovation for a mate who always provided a drink after work. Bewildered by the task ahead, I knocked off and sat down to a bout of drinking and thinking. Do I pack the walls or do I jackhammer and shift the pipe? Then it came to me: Why doesn't someone make an adjustable tray with a waste that can be fitted through the tray from above?

When I went to purchase my first car, there were so many things I did not know and did not understand about the process. After a great deal of research and conversing with friends I still made a lot of mistakes. Realising how much research and street know-how is required, I created this iPhone application, which can help at the most important time, when you actually go to look at and purchase a car.

Blue Zoo was a boutique management advisory firm, and came to the realisation that our industry was fundamentally inefficient. Our services were largely unavailable to the SME and not-for-profit sectors due to cost, and unavailable to regional and remote areas due to availability of qualified people. We set about to commercialise our intellectual capital into an instrument that would still be valuable to large companies, but would also be accessible to smaller organisations and regional areas.

Kogan invented LivePrice when we realised there were shoppers around the world pre-paying for goods but not receiving any benefits for doing so. LivePrice creates a win-win situation for both retailers and shoppers. It rewards customers who jump on great deals quickly.

I was holding four cans of beer whilst waiting for the Jesus and Mary Chain to come on stage at the 2008 V Festival. Like all cans at festivals, the four cans had been opened at the bar. Someone bumped my elbow and the bottom can in one hand fell to the ground and the beer in it exploded out and covered me in beer. Two thoughts came into my head: "Crap, there goes seven bucks," and then, "I wish I could re-seal the cans after they open them at the bar..." And that's when I came up with the Spillah can lid.

Aviator is a venture spun out of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. Leveraging UTS’ proprietary software around thought classification for controlling electronic devices, the venture is developing a wheelchair control solution to respond to the needs of the severely disabled and paralysed.

Mouse Eye Tracking enables online marketers, webmasters, web designers and developers to analyse and generate actionable insights that drive online marketing strategy. This is achieved via three key features: Heat Maps, Mouse Tracking and Page Navigation. These features give Mouse Eye Tracking the unique ability to record and display user interaction on each web page.

Shortcuts realised that whilst the Internet offers significant revenue opportunities, less than one fifth of Australian salons have an online presence -- and are missing out on potential business. Already enabling salons to take bookings online, Shortcuts wanted to drive more business to salons at minimal risk and cost to them, and enable potential clients to find Shortcuts salons anywhere, anytime.

After working with companies that needed to store massive and growing data collections on computers that could no longer match their growth in I/O capacity each year, we realised that eventually all these companies must resort to parallel processing of their large data collections. They simply have no other direction to go in. Our approach was to bring together the best available technologies to make the world's fastest MPP system that permits simple expansion beyond the size of the largest systems in operation in the world today.

We realised that although there are 6.8 billion people of the earth, only 2 billion have the Internet. However, they are now getting online at record rates. While people join up, looking to improve their socio-economic situation, the Internet began delivering a tectonic shift to the global labourforce. Freelancer.com was created to facilitate this shift -- by connecting businesses of all sizes to the world's largest liquid workforce -- over 2.3 million professionals.

Inventor Don Richardson was approached by AFGC with a problem that its food industry members were confronting; it had to do with improving and monitoring the refrigerated distribution of perishables -- foods and pharma products -- during distribution. The industry wanted a more responsive way to ensure their product food safety. Richardson was then granted patents in numerous OECD countries for its unique business process.

Carla Penn, the founder, was visiting her monthly local farmers' market early on a Winter's morning in the pouring rain. She thought to herself, there must be a better way to access the same food products without having to physically be at the market and without having to wait another 30 days before she could repurchase. So she went home and started with a simple Google search and nothing appeared.

This innovation came to life after spending ten years in the Internet business and finding it was still way too difficult for the average business to run an online store. Worse still, marketing online was getting more complex, and you needed a swag of different tools to make it happen.

It came to life after reading Anita Roddick's book of collected essays, Troubled Water, which amongst other things predicted wars on water in the 21st century. It was not long after, when I was tackling more water-related dilemmas, I determined that the conundrum of bottled water could use a marketer's approach. The notion that in a country where there is perfectly safe tap water available it is ridiculous that we are quenching our thirst with bottled water. My solution: 321 Water.

Vickie Johnson (founder & director) was working in her car between coffee shop meetings in the North Queensland heat in December 2009. Sweating and watching the battery power of the laptop depleting, she reflected on the fact that using her iPhone right now she could book a hotel room or a flight to England, but here she was working in the car and having meetings in coffee shops with no other options. Being a woman of action rather than negativity, she set about creating a network providing businesses with access to work or meeting space Australia-wide.

The Sunraysia team became aware of research studies on the benefits of beetroot juice in relation to lowering blood pressure, and this, paired with the knowledge that heart health is a major concern for Australians, resulted in an opportunity to create a juice that combined the health of beetroots with the sweet taste of apples. With no beetroot juice readily available in Australian supermarkets, Sunraysia Beetroot & Apple juice was born.

Some members of this team were trying to build an Artificial Intelligence 'Learning' search engine that required plenty of computing power. After seeing what was out in the market, the idea to build a High Performance Cloud computing company was born.

Despite the lack of data management, businesses have come to depend on data for core operations and the cost of this data not being accessible in a timely fashion can be staggering. Virtual DBA came to life to meet the day-to-day challenges of availability, performance and administration of an organisation's critical Microsoft SQL Server databases.