Each year, PDMA runs a competition for the Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award (OCI). Over recent years this award has been won by a number of well known companies including Xerox, Harley Davison, DuPont and Eastman Kodak. To date, only one company outside the US has won the award.

Wouldn’t it be great to see a New Zealand company take out the OCI award for 2011 or 2012.

Following is an abstract from OCI section of the PDMA website http://pdma.org/recognition_oci.cfm.

“The Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award is the only innovation award which recognizes sustained (5 or more years) quantifiable business results from new products and services.

For over twenty-three years, The Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award selection process has provided an excellent mechanism for identifying companies which create and capture value through Product & Service Innovation in New Product Development. Past OCI Award winners have proven themselves exceptionally capable of integrating strategy, people, process, and technology to consistently transfer their creative ideas into successful new products.

The award was developed with two objectives. First, to identify and publicly recognize the excellence of companies that have been the most successful in continuously developing a stream of value creating new products and services. The second, and equally important, rationale for the award is to provide a learning vehicle for the sharing of the winning firm's individual best practices with PDMA's general membership.”