Pipeline's Innovation Awards is an awards program that recognizes companies for innovations and technology developments in given categories. The awards program is maintained and developed by Pipeline Publishing, which publishes a magazine focused on communication service providers and their businesses. The publishing company offers the awards as an opportunity for a company to promote their product and increase their visibility to possible customer companies; the company gives multiple levels of recognition across ten categories.
Each year, the awards are judged by a panel of stakeholders from service providers, analysts, and financial institutions from Pipeline's Industry Advisory Board. These judges are selected each year based on their expertise across the over ten categories, but the identities of those judges are held in confidence to avoid any possibility of influence. Partner organizations include the following:
- AT&T
- BT
- CenturyLink
- Comcast
- Cox
- GlobalCapacity
- Intelsat
- Singtel
- Telenor
- Telus
- Turkcell
- Vodafone
- Windstream
- Analysys Mason
- Appledore Research Group
- Infonetics Research
- New Paradigm Resources
- Technology Research Institute
- Software Market Insight
- Lotus Innovations
- Moonlight Capital
- KREM Group
- Rhapsody Ventures
The awards are offered in over ten categories each year, and they tend to change year on year. For example, in 2021, the categories for the awards included the Most Innovative Operator, Most Innovative Technology Provider, Innovations in Operational Support Systems, Innovations in Business Support Systems, Innovations in Data Aggregation, Innovations in Analytics, Innovations in Cloud, and Editor's Choice.
To enter a company for the awards, the company can submit an application for itself. Through a submission, a company provides information on whether they are a technology provider or an operator, whether the nomination type is a standard type, early bird nominee, or pipeline nominee. A company then selects the category under which they are submitting. The nominees are required to submit a specific innovation, and the submissions are paid to Pipeline.
