An IT company which has developed a progrmame for developing and attracting talent and innovation at the workplace, and a company which has developed software for real-time business expenses management, with application in 10 countries of the EU – these are the winners in the Innovative Enterprise of the Year contest for 2019.

The awardees receive the label “Excellence in Innovation”. The distinction is awarded, every year, to the finalists in the national contest, which takes place under the patronage of the President of Bulgaria Rumen Radev. The event is organized by the Applied Research and Communications Fund. This year’s nominees for significant achievements and cutting-edge innovations in this country included enterprises operating in the sphere of IT and mobile applications, marketing, data management, the agricultural industry, medicine, motor vehicles etc.

The award ceremony held at the Presidency on 30 January was attended by representatives from countries which are innovation leaders – Germany, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Great Britain and Poland – core partners of the Bulgarian award-winning companies.

Plamen Tsekov, CEO of one of the companies which reached the contest finals – Scale Focus – explains for Radio Bulgaria:

We started out in Bulgaria even though we are a small country. In practice we sell our software projects around the globe, 80 percent of our projects are in North America and Western Europe. We have been operating for almost eight years. My advice to young entrepreneurs is to know that though we may be a small country that does not mean we cannot have big projects. What it takes in order to do that is a good team, lots of courage and more work. The aims one pursues need to be ambitious and feasible. And nothing is impossible. A lot of people my age emigrated and went to work abroad. But 20 years later the software industry in this country has reached the highest levels. And what we are now seeing is the reverse process – foreigners and Bulgarian expats are coming to Bulgaria because here they can attain faster and better-quality development than in the countries of Western Europe, for example. Bulgaria is a better place to work as long as people do not restrict themselves to the small market, to our own selves, but think big, with a broader horizon.

Innovations are the key to attaining a high and sustainable economic growth rate but they are also the key to our future, said President Rumen Radev and laid emphasis on the need to set up a National Centre of Innovation:

Not only do innovations create a much better living environment, they mould the people of the future. Innovations cultivate positive thinking, giving people the strength to uphold their ideas, to think ahead to the future. We need more support from the state, the percentage the state earmarks for research and development is unsatisfactory. It is not just a matter of giving money, but of how the process is organized. Setting up a National Centre of Innovations is long overdue. I have an idea we at the presidential institution have been working on – we need to transfer innovation in terms of occupation and way of thinking down to an even young age. We need to target Bulgarian children. Our proposal is for a digital technologies and innovations centre, open to schoolchildren, to be set up in every regional town. These centres must have high-tech equipment so that schoolchildren may be able to prepare, free of charge, for the new technologies of the future and acquire a culture of innovation. This will have a huge impact on the culture of innovation in Bulgaria, as well as on demography. And what matters most – it will help mould a generation of young, innovative, courageous Bulgarians.

Photos: ScaleFocus and BTA