Why We Won

Award, Business Excellence Forum, Innovative, R&D, team,

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Element scooped the Award for Most Innovative Company at the 2017 Business Excellence Forum

The Business Excellence Forum is a yearly event that caters for businesses that want to be better at what they do.

At the forum dinner, awards are given in recognition of outstanding performance in various aspects of business.

This is a major event, attended by hundreds of the UK’s most successful, dynamic and ambitious small businesses and the competition to win awards is hyper-intense.

For Element to win the 2017 innovative award is a terrific achievement and is something that the whole team here can be very proud of.

I want to say a few words about our achievement.

According to the judges, Element was the ‘stand-out entry’ due to our whole business approach to innovation.  In my acceptance speech, I made the point that we are a Cambridge company, we are laboratory based and we mostly employ scientists and so technical and product innovation is something we can do every day.

The reason we won so convincingly, is that our culture of innovation runs across the whole company:

• We know how to conduct experiments
• We know how to work with and interpret data
• We know great innovations come from the cross-fertilisation of ideas from highly diverse sources

We don’t restrict these disciplines to the laboratory, we apply them whenever there is something in the business that we want to improve.

Element’s policy of employing former customers, gives us deep insight into current customer’s problems and priorities; this was singled out as something that other companies could learn from.

Our R&D program also figured (in this case, R&D stands for Rip-off and Duplicate*).  We actively seek great innovations outside the business, that we can adapt for our own benefit. R&D is a jokey reminder that all good ideas must be treated equally – wherever they come from; it’s an anti-venom for the poison of ‘not-invented-here’.

Finally, the vital point, we were also able to show how innovation has resulted in an acceleration in business growth over the last three years.

If I say that I am proud for Element to win this award, that doesn’t come half-way in explaining how I feel.

Expect more innovations to come.  We have plenty of ideas!

*Original concept devised by GERSTEL USA; Ripped-off and Duplicated by Element.