Local Innovation Award Winners Announced | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Raleigh, N.C.-Governor Pat McCrory's nationally-recognized Innovation Center (iCenter) is pleased to announce the winners of North Carolina's first Innovation Awards. The Innovation Awards were launched to recognize the excellent work being done to make government more effective, efficient and user-friendly for the citizens of North Carolina.
    "Governor McCrory believes that technology is the key to modernizing government," said North Carolina Department of Information Technology Secretary Keith Werner. "I am proud to see that approach being carried out at all levels of government. As technologies evolve, we need to evolve as well. Doing so will ensure we stay one step ahead in the way we deliver services to our citizens."

    The following entries were selected as award recipients for their respective categories:

• Digital Innovation, Wake County Government
• • Wake County never ceases to innovate. They harnessed the power of data by bringing aboard a data scientist and also creating an open data portal. They are pushing hard to become a "smart county," and this year they won the coveted Digital Counties Survey by placing #1 nationally.

• Municipal Innovator Awards
• • City of Asheville: In June, Asheville announced the latest in its efforts with open data - an updated open-data portal at data.ashevillenc.gov. It provides the public an array of useful, downloadable information, from crime locations to flood maps to demographics to a list of all properties on the National Register of Historic Places. It also offers a portal where anyone can nominate new topics to include. Making such data so easily available pays off for demographers, developers and marketplace individuals.
  • Town of Benson: Among other things, the town of Benson has converted its electric and water meters to a two-way Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Smart Grid system that tracks better utility data, helps to decrease water leaks and enables town staff to restore power faster amid outages.
  • City of Durham: Durham city and county paired to launch in 2015, an open-data portal of city and county information that keeps it simple for the stakeholders but also enables "data storytelling" with tables, graphs and maps. It is information that has always been public record, but now is made more readily available for reporters, businesspeople and anyone else who has use for it.
  • City of Raleigh: In Raleigh's application for this year's U.S. Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge, the city's identification of traffic issues and innovative proposals for change prove how advanced its planners are and show how they are picturing tomorrow differently.
  • City of Charlotte: Charlotte's application for the Smart City prize focused on, among other areas, preparing for autonomous vehicles and working with vehicle-to-infrastructure technology to enable freight signal priority. Envision Charlotte, is a "public-private-plus" partnership that the city launched in 2011 to focus on better use of energy in the city's business district for reduced costs in buildings. Not only has it worked, with real-time monitoring, it has become a national model eyed by the White House.

    The North Carolina iCenter was established in 2013 by Governor Pat McCrory as a proving ground for technologies before the State invests in them. To find out more about the North Carolina iCenter, visit www.icenter.nc.gov. Follow us @ncicenter.

• Contact: Michelle Vaught
•     michelle.vaught@nc.gov