Creately name a top innovation in Australia at Tech23

I have a confession to make. I have been so busy working between our R&D centre in Sri Lanka and our head office in Melbourne, Australia that this blog post is a little late.

Back in June we entered Creately in to the Tech23 competition. Tech23 is a celebration of innovation with the aim is to find Australia’s 23 most innovative companies. The 23 that form part of the 23 go to Sydney, Australia to present and pitch their innovation to a board of experienced industry sector experts. There are several categories with numerous prizes up for grabs for the best innovations.

We are justifiably proud of Creately and what we have brought to the world. We love Creately and working with our users and customers to make it better. We thought that taking part in Tech23 would give us another mechanism to showcase our innovation. However like with anything you enter there is a selection process. As you can appreciate this kind of competition has lots of entrants – over 150 in fact – so it never makes sense to think you’ll make it as the disappointment can be a real blow. But of course we secretly hoped

On July 8 2011 we found out that we had been selected as one of the Tech23 2011 companies! Hurray! It turns out that the initial application is probably the easiest bit. The organisers did a great job holding briefing sessions via conference call and in person in Sydney and Melbourne. The Tech23 day, which was Tuesday 23 August, was busy with company and industry leaders breakfast in the morning, followed by the day of presentations and talks and then the networking/drinks in the evening. On the day each company has to give a 5 minute presentation about their innovation and company. It isn’t a pitch in the traditional investor sense but pitch of your innovation. After the pitch there’s a grilling by industry leaders. We were in the “Meeting the needs of the enterprise” cateogry and our industry leaders were Bill Bartee (Managing Director, Southern Cross Venture Partners), Mike Cannon-Brookes (Director, Tyro & CEO / Co-Founder, Atlassian) and Glenn Wightwick (IBM Distinguished Engineer, Chief Technologist, IBM Australia & Director, IBM R&D – Australia) (links to each person).

The whole day was fantastic and very interesting. It is always interesting to see the level of innovation present within Australia and coming out of Australian companies. Definitely punching above our weight. Overall we were named in the top 10 companies on the day and won the “ANZATech most ready to go global award”.

We continue to gather these accolades and you can see the full list on our customer love and press coverage pages. As they say it is onwards and upwards and we will continue to improve and innovate. We are not resting, we are innovating!

Do let me know your ideas for innovations around Creately in the comments below.

Chandika