Monica Fusaro and Marta Calderai, AIM Group International, were the celebrated winners of the IAPCO Driving Excellence Innovation Award, as supported by IMEX. In a break from tradition, the awards ceremony took place during the IAPCO #WinningWebinar as part of Planet IMEX titled ‘Olympians and Meeting Professionals – not so different after all’, with inspirational speakers, Panos Tzivanidis, Director at International Olympic Committee – Corporate Events and Services, and Victoria Thornley, Olympic Medallist for Team GB – Rowing.
The award, introduced by Carina Bauer, CEO of IMEX, and Ori Lahav, IAPCO President, was celebrated by a Zoom audience of meeting professionals.
IAPCO President, Lahav, said ‘Striving for Excellence, Professionalism, Resilience and Determination are just four qualities that meeting professionals and Olympians have in common.
2020 has been a challenging year, where we saw a complete landscape change in the meetings industry. Face to face meetings were postponed and cancelled. We, as meeting professionals, have had to adapt quickly and deliver innovative solutions to continue to organise valuable business meetings in virtual and hybrid formats.
The IAPCO Driving Excellence Innovation Award, supported by IMEX celebrates these innovations and creative solutions, where individuals have met a challenge and gone the extra mile to deliver above and beyond our clients’ expectations.
Our 2020 finalists, focussed on different areas of innovation; the first, from ICOM Egypt, concentrated on sustainability and CSR awareness to the delegates. The candidate from Conference Partners International, Ireland, created an innovative internal system to streamline operational procedures and ensure maximum quality delivery of business meetings to clients. The final shortlisted candidate from AIM Group International introduced web TV to their clients’ congress to broaden the reach of its high-quality scientific content.’
The finalists for the 2020 IAPCO Innovation Award were:
- Zeyed Akram, ICOM
- Miriam Verdon, Conference Partners International.
- Monica Fusaro and Marta Calderai, AIM Group International
The IAPCO Innovation award is in its sixth year and attracted a record-breaking number of high-quality submissions. The results were very close and all those shortlisted deserve recognition for their creative solutions.
