'Our success has skyrocketed after winning the award'

Added on 13 April 2023

Tags

'Our success has skyrocketed after winning the award'

GreenTech Amsterdam will take place on 13, 14 and 15 June. Just like every year, the GreenTech Innovation & Concept Awards will be presented to the most promising products and concepts in the international greenhouse horticulture. Together with the new jury chairman Jolanda Heistek, we are looking ahead to the competition and asked the winners of 2022 what it brought them.

During GreenTech Amsterdam 2023, two innovation prizes will be awarded to GreenTech exhibitors. The Innovation Award will go to the most unique, high-tech, and advanced technological innovation. The Concept Award is for an innovation which is not on the market yet but has the most potential to have a successful market introduction within two years.

This will be done this year with a new jury chairman, Jolanda Heistek. As an independent innovation broker, Heistek has worked in the background on innovations within the sector in recent years, and now as director of the triple helix collaborative network Greenport West-Holland, she can be an impartial chairman. “I was surprised but also excited when I was approached for this position. In recent years I have seen and experienced how GreenTech is able to bring parties together and put innovations in the spotlight in the interests of the horticultural sector. I look forward to contributing to this.”

Fewer resources
According to Heistek, it is very important that horticulture continues to innovate. “It makes the sector able to become even more sustainable in the coming years. Only by innovating, we can achieve an even higher quality and higher production by using fewer resources. Technological innovations in the field of digitization, automation and robotization can give a huge boost to this. At the same time, by innovating we can also make the industry more interesting and attractive for people to work in. By creating new functions, offering different types of work, and making horticulture even more high-tech, we can attract people from other sectors.”

Heistek is positive about the level of innovation in horticulture. “But we can go one step further if we bring in even more knowledge and technology from other industries and use it to our advantage. That is precisely why it is good to bring different people and worlds together. We tend to always keep looking into our scene, but then your knowledge world will remain small. By increasing our visibility and being open to developments outside horticulture on an international scale, we can take huge steps in the coming years. I, therefore, hope that we will see innovations in this year’s competition that can provide a breakthrough and that really make a difference. Products and concepts that have real potential and that can continue to grow, partly due to the attention of the GreenTech Innovation & Concept Awards. I am confident that there will be great entries again this year, because our sector will always continue to develop.”

Put in the spotlight
In 2022, the GreenTech Innovation Award went to Biobest for Micromus-System, a brown lacewing that fights aphids. “We participated because we want to put our innovations in the spotlight and show that Biobest is an innovative company,” says Ines De Craecker, Product Manager at Biobest. “As a company, we continuously strive for improvement. We think along with our customers and have the ideology to bring innovations to the market that can help growers to solve the challenges and problems they face.”