Innovation For The Nation: UPDATE (Reply)

This is a reply to the comment we’ve had on Innovation For The Nation: UPDATE post.

I’m sorry you feel that we’ve done such a terrible job of managing the competition.

It is our first attempt at this and unfortunately we all have day jobs and have been doing this project in our spare time for absolutely nothing in the hope of helping some innovative products into the public domain.

We’ve spent a huge amount of time and effort trying to circumvent the political correctness of colleges and we’ve tried to reach out to all the major sectors. We did our best and as no-one else has tried anything like this in our business I’m not sure that all we deserve is your criticism. Perhaps you might try and donate a few months of your time to run something next year and we can all learn from that.

As far as the competition date goes I can assure you it’s nothing unusual to extend deadlines, we know that because we enter them and judge on them all the time, and you can see for yourself that the Pentawards and D&AD awards have been extended many times this year. In this instance many people who had just flown in for the major trade fair expressed an interest in entering at the very last minute so we all felt it may raise the quality of the competition.

We’ve said from the onset that all copyright rests with the author and that we are offering our services, if required, for nothing so we’re clearly not fishing for other people’s ideas and as we do packaging for a living and are very, very busy we really don’t need to.

As far as your entry – a ‘vampire’ wine from Romania called Batsblood – is concerned, we all applaud anything enterprising and new and maybe we’ve missed something so perhaps you can explain how your product is not just a copy of an existing ‘vampire’ wine from Romania called Vampire Vineyards (see below).