The competition shortlisted the 30 most impressive of those inventions awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal during the show, presenting those meeting certain standards with a double gold, platinum or diamond award.

Other categories included ‘British Invention of the Year’, ‘International Innovation of the Year’, ‘Environment’ and ‘Design’. Five other companies were awarded a platinum trophy, reported managing director of Tech-ni-fold Graham Harris, with five taking home diamond awards.

"Though it’s not part of the official criteria those diamond awards are typically reserved for doctors and scientists, people behind lifesaving and enhancing technologies. And in fact the platinum awards are usually bestowed upon companies who create solutions on a wider consumer scale," said Harris, citing a fellow platinum award-winner Alexander Bushel and his water collection and purification technology.

Harris added: "To be spoken about in the same sentence as these people is a real honour."

The reason given by the judges for the CreaseStream Mini series’ win, was not only the innovativeness of the technology but its commercial success. Harris said: "It’s not just about the fact we invented something, it’s what we have done with it and how far we have gotten with it. We have proven we can take it through all of the design stages to bring it to market - only a handful of companies could demonstrate that. There were some fantastic products, but you could see they were going to struggle to get financial backing."

He added: "I think the judges were impressed with how we had evolved our technology to develop a range of machines based on a simple rubber o-ring concept that had already served us so well to crease materials and combat the threat of cracking in the offset market. It helped that we could demonstrate the three Mini machines, two of which required no electrical input, and could feed digitally printed sheets without using vacuum pumps, avoiding the problem of marking the sheets during transportation."

Alongside delivering technical demos of the CreaseStream Mini and hosting a Christmas card challenge where visitors competed to crease as many cards in 60 seconds as possible, Tech-ni-fold also demonstrated new packaging and instant-play video card tutorials at the show.

The cards are being rolled out to replace in-person installation where the customer is happy with this cost-saving alternative.

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