2008 Award Ceremony

On the evening of Wednesday November 26, the main hall of Brussels’ historic Tour & Taxis building was transformed into an awards auditorium as over 200 Belgian business leaders arrived to celebrate the best in innovation. This year, the competition added something new – the Jury selected two Best Innovators: one for large companies and one for SME’s.

A.T. Kearney Partner Laurent Dumarest and Principal Peter Van den Brande hosted the evening, which Laurent began by providing some background to the event, describing the selection criteria and explaining today’s key challenges for superior innovation management.

After the opening remarks of Armand De Decker – Chairman of the Belgian Senate a lively panel discussion was held with representatives from all five nominated companies.

- in the Large Company category: one Winner (Barco), one Laureate for Innovation Strategy (Philips Lighting) and 3 Finalists (AGC Flatglass Europe, Deceuninck and Omega Pharma),

- in the SME category: one Winner (Imperbel) and two Finalists (Freemind Consulting and CO2Logic).

The presentation of the awards was followed by short presentations from the laureate and winner as they described their innovation processes in more detail. Laurent Dumarest then closed the formal portion of the evening by inviting all the guests to mingle with the finalists during a walking dinner that lasted late into the evening.