The award is the “Future Unicorn Award”. An award which “aims at celebrating SMEs from across Europe that have the potential to become the future European Tech giants. It puts under the spotlight SMEs which have demonstrated to be successful in digitising their business processes and in offering innovative digital products and services.”
Is that us? WOW! We did not see that one coming. With much humility, as there are so many companies making a difference, we are grateful for this recognition. Other than the honour, we see this as an opportunity for raising our voice on matters in the digital sphere which are important. And yes, as you know, we are opinionated 😉
DIGITALEUROPE is a pan European organisation of national trade organisations (including non-EU countries like Norway, Switzerland, Belarus and Turkey). In their own words, Digital Europe wants to “reward the most promising tech SMEs across Europe. The award is a testimony of the vital importance of SMEs in the wider digital ecosystem. And it represents an opportunity to advocate for EU-wide policies and regulatory frameworks that nurture the entrepreneurial culture and enable SMEs to scale up”.
This makes sense to us. A common predictable playing field is as important for us as it is for our clients, partners and users. On the regulation side of things, we have seen “GDPR” being crucial in privacy now being the norm. GDPR turned out to be a blessing in disguise. And along those lines, Umbraco does see regulation as a mean to counter the “Surveillance Capitalism” coined by Shoshana Zuboff.
Following the methodology of Digital Europe, each member association has been given the opportunity to nominate a single company. The 16 finalists are therefore already a result of a careful selection. Digital Europe covers more than 40 European countries and more than 35,000 companies. Find all 16 nominated companies who are in the finale.
This week! The show will take place on Thursday the 21st of February at the Master of Digital 2019 held in Brussel. During the conference, the winner will be announced. We are sending our own Chief Unicorn Niels Hartvig and SWAT team lead Jim Jensen to represent Umbraco. Further, Niels will participate and represent our mindset in panel debates around “Digital ecosystems & the difficulties in scaling up in Europe” and/or “How can the EU take leadership in shaping the digital future”.
We are very excited and honoured to find ourselves in the finale of this award and to be invited to take part in these important discussions. Now, there’s nothing left to do than to cross our fingers 🤞
We all know that Umbraco invented the unicorn term and have big love for all things unicorn 😉 We all also know that in our world it has another meaning than valuation above a certain amount. So whether we win or not, we see this award and our nomination as an appreciation of the Umbraco spirit 🦄
The Umbraco Awards is the annual event where we celebrate all the great solutions that are being built on Umbraco. Seeing all the impressive submissions last year was such an eye-opener in terms of how far you can take Umbraco and we were humbled by the amount and the quality of the nominations we received. We’re sure it’ll be just as good - even better! - this year. So let us see those projects: