Innovation Awards

Why participate?

The OWF Demo Cup has been recognized as an important showcase and deal-making forum in Europe and worldwide. It is the launchpad for innovative Open Source technologies, products and services.

The OWF Innovation Awards 2012 will be awarded to the top best presenters at the Demo Cup. The contest is open to all Open Source projects and solutions getting ready for commercial launch or already on the market. The jury will be looking at those projects and solutions most likely to have a significant impact on society and on the marketplace.

The OWF Demo Cup is about products; it requires timed, live demonstrations; and does not allow slide presentations! In recognition of the difficulty of communicating the power and value of Open Source projects on stage in a short 7 minutes, the Demo Cup will honor outstanding presentations. Chosen for their style, passion, clarity, and sometimes for their sheer fun, these Open Innovation Awards reward a unique ability to deliver a great product and position it in the market,to show off its most compelling features, to differentiate it from other products — and along the way to entertain a tough and critical Open World Forum audience.

The selection process

We're looking for projects that have already produced real working code, that are mature enough to provide a demo, that have real users, but could use the extra push, in terms of credibility and visibility, that an OWF Innovation Award can provide to establish themselves as true market leaders.

Our jury will select a number of finalists based on information you will provide them.

The competition is about selecting innovative open source projects with a potential business or societal impact. To assess these points, we need you to provide us with:

• Information about your open source project (the community website of your project - including a link to downloadable sources).
• Information about your business: basically a (simplified) business plan. If you are uncomfortable disclosing confidential information about your company to third parties, don't ask us to sign a NDA, just don't provide the information you think sensitive.

Call for participation

Candidates should submit an Executive Summary (a short version of their "business" plan, max 5 pages long, with "business" interpreted in the largest sense, i.e. non profit can also apply) with a Logo for their Open Source project or solution, together with an overview of their application, and a 1/2 page text explaining how they expect to perform their demonstration.

A screencast or video of a demonstration would also be helpful for the jury, but not mandatory at this point.

Please download our information package from here, fill it, and send it to innovationsummit@openworldforum.org to get started.

The finals (oct. 12th, 4:30pm-6:00 pm)

On stage. 7 minutes — just you and your product in front of the Open World. Your product will be showcased to the audience of the Open World Forum.

Networking. The Open Innovation Summit is uniquely designed to create instant access and fruitful interaction. Open Innovation is different — we focus the attention on your Open Source project or solution, regardless of your team's size or budget. Over the course of three days, the Open World Forum agenda puts you in a position to network with investors from around the world, corporate managers from acquiring companies and the most influential reporters and bloggers in the Open Source communities.

Award Ceremony. The ceremony will take place in the plenary conference room after one of the closing keynotes.

The jury

The Demo Cup Jury includes investors, entrepreneurs, Open Source managers from leading IT services companies, and consultants - all of them experts in Open Source and innovation.

Calendar

• Hard Deadline for submitting your application: Aug. 31th 2012.
• Finalists proclamation: Sept. 10th 2012.
• Rehearsals: Oct. 10th 2012.
• Demo Cup Finals: Oct. 12th 2012.

Past winners

2011

The winners of the 2011 edition of the Innovation Awards were:

• Engineering Group for Spago BI - t he only 100% open source business intelligence suite, supports the agile development of Business Intelligence applications, guaranteeing quick development, flexibility and continuous improvement.
• Joshfire for The Joshfire Framework - The first open source multi-device framework dedicated to web, mobile, tablets, TV and specific connected objects
• Seeks for The Seeks project - A collaborative, decentralized with automated expertise extraction search software 

2010

The winners of the 2010 edition of the Innovation Awards were:

• Disruptive Innovations (for the BlueGriffon project)
• Jaspersoft
• Obeo (for the Acceleo project)
• Talend
• XWiki

2009

The winners of the 2009 edition of the Innovation Awards were:

• BonitaSoft, 
• Kaltura, 
• ScaleDB, 
• SonarSource 
• Ulteo.

Quotes from past winners

Daniel Glazman, of Disruptive Innovation / BlueGriffon project, said: "I am delighted and proud to let you know that BlueGriffon was today a winner of the Open World Forum Innovation Awards! Many people came to me only to say they found the software impressive and superb and/or its business model valid.

Tom Cahill, VP EMEA of Jaspersoft, said: "We are delighted to receive this award, and would like to thank the Open World Forum and the members of the jury for this honor. It underscores our ability to innovate in the open source space and adapt to evolving market needs. Jaspersoft’s products are constantly being enhanced thanks to our 160,000-strong community of developers, and this prize bears testimony to the entire Jaspersoft ecosystem."

XWiki said: "We are proud to announce that XWiki received one of five awards, given by the jury composed of international experts from the field of open source. It rewards the work and commitment of a team and a community."

Obeo said: "After the Eclipse Community Award in 2009, this prize recognizes the constant efforts of Obeo and the Acceleo community to provide a quality tool."

Olivier Gaudin from SonarSource said: "For SonarSource, this award has been mainly beneficial on two aspects: 1. It has been a good opportunity for us to structure and formalize our business model and 2. It has been a great encouragement on the fact that our business model was innovative."

Thierry Koerlen from Ulteo said: "I was impressed by the level of quality of the different candidates, coming from different countries. The OWF award is beautiful and original and it is a great recognition for Ulteo. The event itself is also worth coming for the networking."