Award Winners
Winners of the Awards were announced on 21 November 2012 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner 2012
The unique idea behind Klarna's e-commerce services is the concept of after-delivery payment, letting buyers receive ordered goods before any payment is due. Today, Klarna is a leading provider of after delivery payments in Europe, serving more than 15, 000 merchants with a high-quality product used by millions of consumers. Instead of giving financial information, buyers shop with Klarna just by giving their name and select information (Klarna calculates the risk). At the same time, Klarna assumes all credit and fraud risk for online merchants.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO is one of the three co-founders of Klarna and has been the CEO since the start in 2005. Since then Klarna has grown to become one of Europe's leading payment solutions, with over 750 employees and 200 MUSD in revenue. Klarna is the main payment method in its home market and is showing strong growth in 6 more European geographies with a potential reach of over 100 million users. Sebastian started Klarna with his friends directly out of school, however managed to complete his studies and earned a Master's degree in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. Sebastian has been awarded multiple awards for his leadership; "Rising star of the year" by Ernst & Young, "Leader of the Year" by Adecco, "Manager of Tomorrow" by Sweden's leading Management Magazine and "European entrepreneur of the Year Award" by Tech Tour.
Innovation Award Winner 2012
Enecsys Limited is the premier supplier of smart, highly reliable grid-connected micro inverters and monitoring systems that offer an outstanding value proposition. The micro inverter converts and controls DC power generated by each solar module in the PV array into AC power for homes and businesses. The advantages of the Enecsys micro inverter system include: maximized energy harvest, improved safety for installers and users, increased reliability, a lifetime matching that of the solar modules, real-time performance monitoring for each solar module, and simplified PV array design and installation. Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, the company also has sales and support offices in Redwood Shores, California; Bad Homburg, Germany; and Taipei, Taiwan.
Michael Fister, CEO has over 30 years of experience in leading technology companies including five years as CEO of the publicly-listed EDA software company, Cadence Design Systems, Inc. where he was responsible for growing the company from $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion in annual revenue while substantially improving the financial performance of the company. Previously he spent over 20 years with Intel Corporation where he most recently served as senior VP and GM of the Enterprise Platforms group reporting to the CEO. Here he was responsible for growing Intel's Solutions Business including successfully launching both 32-bit Xeon and 64-bit Itanium processor product lines, server chipsets, board-level products and related software tools. He managed revenue of approximately $3 billion driving the development and adoption of industry-standard server and server blade technology with strategic partners. He drove the development and adoption of the high-performance computing category with industry standard processors. Prior to this, he had a number of other roles at Intel, including VP and GM of the Performance Processor Division and GM of the End User Components Division. He has been a member on several boards in the technology, non-profit, and health sectors. Michael holds a M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati.
