Brilliance Awards Winners 2016

Awarded to the New York Times Company, USA

Led by Mark Thompson and Meredith Kopit Levien, the New York Times executed the highly acclaimed legacy-to-digital business pivot of modern times. Facing the terminal decline of print, they structurally transformed their entire operational framework into a digital-first, multi-sided subscription model. By 2016, their “Paywall 2.0” and digital product ecosystem proved that a legacy media company could fully migrate its revenue infrastructure to a digital-native economy.

Awarded to Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, USA

Airbnb was recognized as the ultimate mastery of digital network orchestration, hyper-scaling a multi-sided platform through digitized trust and localized cross-border payment infrastructure. Under Chesky’s macro direction, 2016 served as a trajectory-altering milestone where annual revenue nearly doubled to $1.7 billion, and global adoption surged past 100 million users and 2 million listings. Chesky further cemented this growth by personally spearheading the launch of “Airbnb Experiences,” successfully expanding the digital brand into an all-encompassing travel lifestyle marketplace.

Awarded to Canva, Australia

Under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins, Canva’s innovation wasn’t inventing a new code language; it was entirely about digital accessibility and business model disruption. They took complex, exclusionary desktop publishing tools and re-imagined them as an intuitive, drag-and-drop web and mobile ecosystem. In 2016, they broke out globally by empowering millions of small business owners and creators to build their own digital brand identities without a design background

Awarded to Deliveroo, United Kingdom

Founded by Will Shu and Greg Orlowski, Deliveroo made a huge international breakthrough by introducing localized digital orchestration to the physical gig economy. While the technology (GPS and basic app interfaces) already existed, Deliveroo’s breakthrough was operational and commercial. They digitized the logistics link between premium local restaurants, freelance couriers, and the urban consumer marketplace, entirely altering the high-street hospitality business landscape across Europe and APAC during 2015 and 2016.