The inaugural Intranet Innovation Awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. Uniquely, these awards recognise individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole. The awards are about improving all intranets, by sharing great ideas and increasing the pace of innovation across the whole of the intranet community. Every idea, no matter how small, adds to our understanding of what it means to have a successful intranet.

Global in nature, the Intranet Innovation Awards have uncovered many innovative ideas. Fiat, this year's platinum winner, has used their 'Avanti e Veloci' web portal to help turn around the fortunes of their whole business. The Environment Agency has developed a rich set of personas to support the delivery of better intranet content and functionality. City of Casey and SunGard AvantGard have innovated the traditional staff directory. Perkins Eastman has created active collaborative communities, while Nycomed has brought product information together in a single location, no small challenge for a global pharmaceuticals business. QBE has created an interactive 'Investigator Wizard' to assist in assessing insurance claims.

With winners across four categories (core functionality, communication and collaboration, frontline delivery and business solutions), there are valuable ideas for every intranet team. Fiat was facing an uncertain future, the result of an economic and image crisis which had deepened over past years. The challenge was to revitalize its brand and to re-establish a leadership position in Italy and Europe.

A major cultural change program was launched to establish a new leadership culture within the organisation, and to revitalise business practices. The global program was named 'Fast and Forward' ('Avanti e Veloci'). The new task for the managers was to diffuse this cultural and functional change of business objectives as quickly as possible. The diffusion of the new Leadership model was primarily delivered through a dedicated sub-portal of the company intranet, available to all the 1,000 key managers of the organization (in Italy and abroad).

The Avanti e Veloci web portal played a key role in supporting the program, helping to deliver tremendous organisational benefits to the group. Benefits including helping to turn around a loss of 2 million euros a day to an operating profit level of 5 million euros per day. These numbers speak for themselves.