Race for the prize

I was lucky enough to be able to attend The Engineer’s Technology and Innovation Awards in London last Friday. I also had to present an award for the Civil Engineering section and any slight trepidation that I might have had in standing up in front of a packed hall dissipated when the spotlight was on the winner, System First, which had produced an energy-efficient building foundation system.

The obvious delight of Roger Bullivant, who collected the award, was in contrast to the disappointment of one of the runner-up companies sitting on my table: Hydrascan, with its trenchless pigging system for water mains clearing.

This illustrated a broader lesson for me, as a journalist. Every day, I get bombarded with new products that represent the application of serious amounts of endeavour, ideas and finance to bring them to the market. In my business, too often, out of the necessity of feeding big product directories, news feeds and magazines, we treat such news as a commodity, processing it quickly before moving on to the next one. This is a thoroughly reputable trade of course, but it can mask the qualities of products (beyond the PR’s excitable compound adjectives that we so often trim away).

So, it was a real pleasure on Friday to see products and applications in situ, among the people and companies who developed them, and care passionately about their impact on the wider world. A good lesson for me as a journalist.