Louise is a Women in Innovation Award Winner!

Our Managing Director, Louise Towler has been named one of top female game-changing innovators and business leaders in UK, with a national Women In Innovation Award win.

Announced today, Tuesday 8 March 2022, to mark International Women’s Day, Louise has been recognised as one of 38 top female, innovative entrepreneurs in the country.

Each winner will be awarded a cash injection of £50,000 as well as bespoke mentoring to scale up and bring their innovative business ideas to market.

Our Women In Innovation award entry

The award is for a new innovative platform in development by the team at Indigo Tree, which will empower WordPress website content editors, giving them real-time feedback during the editing process. This will inform them to make educated changes to the content of their site to prevent accessibility issues before they even occur.

Latest technologies will be used to compress and optimise media and reduce page weight. It will offer real-time reporting to the content editor on the resulting CO2 savings.

“When a content editor uploads a very large video to a web page which is missing subtitles and a transcript, they are making their website inaccessible to some of their users and it requires far more energy to deliver the page to the users’ screen. Audits are typically run on a website to check for accessibility and performance issues after the content is added whereas our platform prevents them from happening in the first place.” Louise Towler. Managing Director, Indigo Tree

An independent expert assessor of the award reported:
“There are clear benefits over existing market solutions – a very novel and compelling approach.”

What is the Women in Innovation programme?

Now in its fourth year, the flagship Women in Innovation programme is backed by the UK Government to give more support to women innovators and business leaders. A total of 836 applications from across the length and breadth of the country were submitted for this year’s competition.

Emily Nott, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Innovate UK said:
“It has continued to be a challenging year of uncertainty but these pioneering, resilient women inspire us to dream big and make an impact despite the difficulties we face. Innovate UK will work alongside these winners to ensure they have the resources and support required to turn their innovative ideas and aspirations into a reality, while encouraging a new generation of women to come forward and pursue their ambitions.”

The detailed application process

The 2021/22 competition had a two-phase assessment process. Firstly, all eligible applications were sent to up to five independent expert assessors who scored the application questions and either recommended or did not recommend an application for funding.

The highest scoring applications across each of the UK’s regions were then selected to go to interview, where the expert judging panel scored applications according to the applicant’s suitability for the award, the impact of the award on their business and how innovative the idea was.