The Jürgen Schönhut Memorial CIP4 International Print Production Innovation (CIPPI) Awards were established in order to recognize leading printers†, publishers‡, or prepress services that have demonstrated uncommon leadership in their pursuit of process automation technology. The CIPPI award is named after the late Jürgen Schönhut of the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt Germany. Mr. Schönhut was a founding member of CIP4 whose contribution was instrumental in creating both CIP4 and its predecessor, the CIP3 Consortium (More information on Jürgen Schönhut).

Nominations may be submitted by the printer, publisher or a prepress service, or by one of their supporting vendors on their behalf. Awards are given to the printer, publisher, or prepress service representative identified in the application, and a certificate acknowledging the award is given to each vendor identified in detail in the award application.

Each application is reviewed by a Review Panel that consists of the non-voting chair and five judges that are selected by the CIP4 Board of Directors for their understanding of the subject area and standing in the industry. (See Biographies of the Judges.) The Review Panel judges may select an application for one or more of the following CIPPI awards:

    * First and Second Place — Best cost/benefit realization and improvement in efficiency as a result of process automation implementation
    * First and Second Place — Biggest improvement in quality production & customer responsiveness as a result of process automation
    * Most innovative use of process automation technology in an implementation *
    * Small Business Process Automation Implementation of the Year (e.g., companies with less than 20 total employees, regardless of the number of locations.) *
    * Best Digital Printing Process Automation Implementation of the Year *

Furthermore, based upon the address list on the application for the candidate printer’s, publisher’s or prepress service’s offices, the Review Panel judges will select an annual CIPPI award winner for Best Process Automation Implementation for the following regions:

    * Best Process Automation Implementation — Europe
    * Best Process Automation Implementation — North America
    * Best Process Automation Implementation — Asia Pacific
    * Best Process Automation Implementation — Emerging Markets **

* The Most Innovative, Small Business and Digital Printing awards are given out at the discretion of the Review Panel. In any given year the review panel will not issue these three awards if they decide that there is no appropriate candidate for the award.

** The intention of the “Emerging Markets” category is to recognize process automation implementations by companies operating in areas where JDF-enabled process automation is not yet prevalent and the interpretation of “Emerging Markets” is at Review Panel Judge’s discretion. If no application is found by the Judges to be appropriate to the “Emerging Markets” category in a given year, the award will not be issued in that year.
http://www.cip4.org/cippi/