Honeywell had the Greatest Innovation Potential in 2009

Honeywell has been named the Investor of the Year 2009 in the Greatest Innovation Potential category for the expansion of its research and development centre in Brno. Representatives of the company received the award from Minister of Industry and Trade Martin Kocourek. The second and third place winners in the Greatest Innovation Potential category were Meopta – optika and DYNTEC. This tenth edition of Investor of the Year was organised by CzechInvest and the Ministry of Industry and Trade in cooperation with the Association for Foreign Investment.

Honeywellchose the Czech Republic in 1993 as the location for the construction of its first research and development centre outside the United States. Since that time, the company has further developed its investment activities in the Czech Republic. Honeywell won the Investor of the Year award in the Greatest Innovation Potential category for a project involving the expansion of its research and development centre in Brno.

“Today we are in a period when we are transitioning from implementation support for innovation, which we provide to all units of Honeywell around the world, to the phase in which we are actively seeking out new innovations and we fully control the innovation process. This is also the focus of the growth plan of the development centre in Brno, which in the near future should expand with the addition of 200 engineers,” says Ing. Jaroslav Doležal, National Executive, Honeywell.

Second place in the Greatest Innovation Potential category was awarded to Meopta – optika. This company, with a rich tradition in the manufacture of precision optical and mechanical instruments and devices decided in 2009 to expand its capacities for implementing research, development and innovation activities and constructed a modern research facility with laboratories and prototype workshops in Přerov.

DYNTEC, one of the largest Czech producers of veterinary drugs, received the third-place prize for its project to construct a new centre for research and development of vaccines against bacterial diseases in animals. With the expansion of its research and development capacities, this purely Czech company, which was originally established as a research institute in 1949 in Terezín, is responding to increased demand for its products in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Investor of the Year is a competition organised each year by CzechInvest and the Ministry of Industry of Trade in cooperation with the Association for Foreign Investment. The general partner of this year’s Investor of the Year competition is the ČEZ Group; the partners are ČSOB, the National Gallery, QUIX and Zátiší Catering. The media partners of the event are Euro, Z1, E15 and Strategie.

The competing investment projects are evaluated by a committee composed of representatives of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, the AFI, CzechInvest and previous winners. For the first time this year, the celebratory announcement of the winners was realised in conjunction with the announcement of the results of the Business Property of the Year competition. The awards were presented to the winners today at 7.00 p.m. at the Cloister of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Prague.

BRIEFLY:

Investor of the Year 2009 – Greatest Innovation Potential

1st place: Honeywell, spol. s r.o.

2nd place: Meopta – optika, s.r.o.

3rd place: DYNTEC spol. s r.o.

For more information please contact the CzechInvest Press Centre

Štěpánka Filipová, spokesperson, phone: +420 296 342 538, stepanka.filipova@czechinvest.org

Contact to the AFI:

Martin Michalov, PR and Marketing Manager, tel.: +420 224 911 750, martin.michalov@afi.cz