media:scape With HD Videoconferencing by Steelcase Wins Bronze in Annual Edison Awards
Competition Recognizes Technological and Design Innovation in the Spirit of Thomas Edison
NEW YORK – April 7, 2011 – Steelcase Inc. announced today that it is the recipient of a Bronze award from the Edison Best New Product Awards, an annual competition that recognizes innovation in the spirit of American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison. The Edison Awards chose media:scape with HD videoconferencing, an integrated furniture and technology solution which enhances collaboration, as a winner in the Living, Working & Learning Environments, employee and community learning spaces category.
Steelcase employed a human-centered design methodology when designing media:scape with HD videoconferencing that included behavioral research and ethnographic video to understand the unmet needs of people collaborating at work. With collaborative work increasing significantly and now representing more than 80 percent of today’s activities in the office, Steelcase designed a solution to help workers solve increasingly complex problems with teams who are distributed across the globe.
“media:scape with HD videoconferencing represents a breakthrough in how distributed teams can collaborate,” said Ryan Anderson, product manager, integrated technologies, Steelcase. “To be honored as an innovator in the spirit of Edison is humbling and gratifying for all of us at Steelcase.”
media:scape with high-definition videoconferencing creates dynamic settings for distributed teams to view each other and co-create content simultaneously. Most videoconferencing environments are formal meeting spaces, with little emphasis on sharing and developing content. In contrast, media:scape with HD videoconferencing environments encourage engagement, and allow access to and sharing of information by any meeting participant with the touch of a button.
Founded 24 years ago by the American Marketing Association, the Edison Awards is a peer-reviewed competition with approximately 2,000 voting members of the not-for-profit Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), an association of America’s top executives and academics. The awards symbolize the persistence and excellence personified by Thomas Alva Edison, inspiring America’s drive to remain in the forefront of innovation, creativity and ingenuity in the global economy.
“More than any year, this year’s award winners demonstrate the enormous value of teamwork, experimentation, consumer focus and market awareness,” said Tom Stat, Executive Director, Edison Universe. “I’m especially pleased that so many of our 2011 award winners are innovating around innovation itself by focusing on education, market collaboration and open innovation. These honored award winners show that by stimulating our natural curiosity, fueling our drive for discovery and sparking our need to innovate, no challenge is too big and opportunities abound. Edison himself would be very, very proud.”
Sponsors of the 2011 Edison Awards are The Nielsen Company, Discovery Channel, Science Channel, Spencer Trask and Bzz Agent. The Edison Awards are granted under the aegis of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, a globally recognized research network dedicated to the study of innovation and its application in the 21st Century.
About Steelcase
Steelcase Inc. helps create great experiences — wherever work happens. Our brands offer a comprehensive portfolio of workplace furnishings, products and services, inspired by nearly 100 years of insight gained serving the world’s leading organizations. We are globally accessible through a network of channels, including over 650 dealers. We design for social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Steelcase is a global, publicly traded company leading our industry with fiscal 2011 revenue of approximately $2.4 billion.
The Steelcase Inc. logo is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=4484
Contact:
Sara Whitman
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swhitman@peppercom.com