| 53 The award-winning team at Hamilton-based Enlighten Designs. BUSINESS New Zealand International Business Awards - Enlighten Designs Covid opens ‘huge door’ Sue Russell An innovative digital technologies business based in Hamilton was named finalists in the Best Emerging Business category of the prestigious New Zealand International Business Awards. For Derryn Alexander, the business’s Marketing Lead, the ‘nod’ from the Awards judges is fitting recognition of the ground-breaking nature of its work. “It is a really complex business and its fair to say the role I have has changed a little since I took it on the middle of last year,” says Derryn. Following an intensive judging process Enlighten Designs joins a group of businesses experiencing huge growth. It’s especially gratifying because the decision was made, when COVID first appeared, to hunker down and redeploy its people to focus on international expansion; a bold decision and one that has certainly paid off. Receiving global recognition for its innovative leading-edge application of artificial intelligence technologies and partnering up with global power-house Microsoft to provide it with visual data journalism systems has meant, for instance, that millions of subscribers around the world have been able to see on screen dynamic presentations around the EU elections. “Our Data Storytelling team specialises in finding new and visually interesting ways to get across data to viewers in ways that engage them and can be readily understood,” Derryn explains. Looking back on the time when COVID changed the way business was done, really created a huge door for the company she says. “Clients in the US for instance realised that they didn’t have to meet with local people. They could choose suppliers that had the right skill set so plenty of new opportunities sprung up for us to engage.” To understand the consequences of this shift, one only needs to refer to the value of sales. In 2019 less than 18% of Enlighten Designs income was overseas sourced; now that share has grown to over 50%. “Being able to work with companies in the US and Australia offers us the kind of scale that is rarer here in the NZ market. Another example of that innovation is in the development of what Derryn describes as a ‘quirky and engaging’ visual called The Aquarium for Microsoft Power BI. Instead of data represented in the typical bar graph style, large values are displayed as Big Fish, swimming in an aquarium next to Little Fish. “There are even Dead Fish to quickly show areas where results were falling or failed.” Working with Microsoft opened more digital innovation, to help Journalists to move into the visual story-telling genre, working with giants such as Virgin, Politico, the Florida Times Union and Associated Press. Like most IT companies, much of their business is repeat and Derryn says what separates the culture at Enlighten Designs from many other players is the fact that they haven’t lost the pioneering quality of being visionaries.
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