The Edison Awards honor excellence in new product and service development, marketing, human-centered design and innovation. The awards are delivered by an independent association each September. Award winners represent “game changing” products, services and excellence and leadership in innovation around four criteria: concept, value, delivery and impact. The awards are named after Thomas Alva Edison, the American inventor and businessman famous for inventing the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.
This year’s the awards have acknowledged “Women Behind Innovation”, calling out two leading female technology inventors. These are Hannah Deering, who works for the company Workvia; and Bethany Mayer, who runs Ixia Solutions. Both women acts as important role models for budding female technology entrepreneurs and inventors.
As the only female graduate in her Computer Science program at Iowa State University, Hannah Deering was used to facing major challenges. She has overcome those challenges though, as the recognition form Edison shows. In recent years Deering’s innovative designs have contributed to the success of Workiva’s intuitive cloud platform called Wdesk. The Wdesk platform integrates information from disparate content formats, including spreadsheets, presentation documents, emails and other unstructured data, into a single cloud-based report. This platform is used by thousands of organizations around the world, including over 70 percent of the Fortune 500.
In an interview, Deering spoke about the challenges that women face getting into technology fields: “Early in my college career, I felt very intimidated when students would ask questions I didn’t understand. I rarely raised my hand, because I felt that I represented my entire gender. If I didn’t get it, women didn’t get it, and I was just proving the stereotype that women didn’t belong. Fortunately, I had supportive classmates, who also didn’t get it, and as we worked together on homework and projects, I got braver.”
With more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry, Bethany Mayer has held multiple key executive roles, and in 2015 was named by CRN as a “Top 25 Disruptor in Technology” due to her leadership in breakthrough technology developments. In an interview about the recognition from Edison, Mayer said: “Working in technology has been a very exciting career. I have been fortunate to work on technologies that have changed the way we live and work. From laptops to the Internet, to WiFi, to cyber security, to Cloud, to IoT – I have created and sold products in all those markets.”
These inspirational women are among some of the most admired executives and experts in the technology world, producing new products and services that are disrupting numerous industries, and providing inspiration for the next generation of female innovators.
