Borrell Associates, Inc

We’ll announce our Innovator of the Year award in New York on Tuesday, and I’m sure the person who walks through the luncheon crowd to the podium will be a surprise.  One might think it would go to a Web site manager who’s done something different, or a developer who’s created an app that emits the aroma of coffee from a Droid when you’re near a Starbucks.

Uh, no.  It’s going to a chief executive at a traditional media company.  Saywhat? A stodgy, button-downed media CEO worthy of an online innovator’s award?  Don’t innovators become innovators despite executive management?

That’s exactly why we selected this year’s recipient for the 2010 Borrell Award of Merit.  Our winner has demonostrated a deep understanding of disruptive innovation, organized the company for optimum performance, and drove outstanding results.  The litmus test for all three of our Awards of Merit is financial results, not “coolness.” And the financial performance that this executive stimulated is a real head-turner.

In a column for Inside Radio last November, I plucked a few CEO’s ears for failing to even recognize the outstanding effort that their interactive directors were tackling.   Only one company — RadioOne — routinely described its online ventures in any detail.  Bonneville Broadcasting produced a snazzy 22-minute video to describe all the great things it accomplished, snubbing its online efforts with an eight-second mention.  Even TV executives spend very little time discussing online ventures in their annual reports and presentations.

By now I guess you figured I’m not going to name the person or even give any clues, but thanks for getting to the end of the blog anyway.  Suffice it to say that we’re selecting this recipient because we believe that innovation may start at the bottom, but too often gets thumb-squashed by bean-counting CEOs at the top.  This executive opened the doors wide and stimulated transformation in a way that I think Wall Street will sit up and pay attention.

We’ll post the recipient’s name on our Web site Tuesday afternoon — along with the names of three other companies who will receive awards.  But if you’d like the immediate scoop, I’ll Twitter a few minutes before the announcement.  You can pick it up at www.twitter.com/goborrell.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 5:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.