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(KNSI) – The St. Cloud Development Corporation’s (GSDC) 10th annual Innovation Awards were presented this week. The four award recipients for 2021, listed in alphabetical order, are the Greater St. Cloud Public Safety Foundation, MK1 Engineering, the city of Waite Park and Wolters Kluwer.

Due to ongoing COVID-19 precautions, an in-person ceremony will be delayed until spring 2022, at which time videos of the innovative projects will be shown and winners – each of which also received a $1,000 award – will describe what inspired their creations.

Since the Innovation Awards’ inception in 2012, the GSDC has honored for-profit and non-profit organizations that developed new products or approaches to benefit the Greater St. Cloud region and beyond.

About the award winners:

Greater St. Cloud Public Safety Foundation – Category: Non-profit/Established (operating 3+ years)

The Foundation created the St. Cloud Rotary Community Outpost (COP House), which opened in 2017 with the goal of implementing an innovative approach to community policing. Located on property that had generated over 200 calls for service by public safety in the three years prior to 2017, at 600 13th St. S., the COP House continues to help stabilize the neighborhood by building relationships with diverse community members, reducing crime, providing youth development and enrichment activities, providing access to on-site social and medical services and empowering citizens to be more engaged.In addition to being staffed by St. Cloud Police Department personnel, the COP House is home to Stearns County social services resources; medical resources from CentraCare; and a Mayo Medical 24/7/365 paramedic ambulance.

MK1 Engineering – Category: For-profit/Emerging (operating 3 years or fewer)

MK1 Engineering created the world’s first system to orient corn seed during planting, to precisely optimize and increase yield. Called AeroTube, the technology uses innovative aerodynamics to orient a corn seed tip down with the germ facing the adjacent row to optimize the plant-to-plant relationship.

During Spring 2021, the MK1 team put in over 100 acres of test plots with the AeroTube system across the Midwest. In formal university studies, orienting seed has increased yield by 9 to 29 percent.

With extremely tight margins in farming, AeroTube could potentially double a grower’s income in an environmentally responsible manner, since the technology does not employ the use of harmful chemicals or complex mechanical systems.

City of Waite Park – Category: Non-profit/Established (operating 3+ years)

The City’s creation of The Ledge Amphitheater was selected for an Innovation Award because of its creative reuse of a former quarry and an excellent public-private partnership that allowed the venue to be developed in an affordable manner.

The City started with the land donated by Martin Marietta, and worked with many local contractors to reduce costs associated with the project. In addition, the City also found innovative ways to reach out to some of the local nonprofit agencies for assistance in return for financial support of their organizations. All of these efforts assisted in reducing the construction costs of the site.

The result is a 5,000-seat outdoor amphitheater that includes walking trails and a unique pocket park that offers opportunities for smaller events. The City of Waite Park estimates that The Ledge, opened in July 2021, will bring 60,000 – 80,000 visitors to the venue each year.

Wolters Kluwer – Category: For-profit/Established (operating 3+ years)

The St. Cloud-based technology team of Wolters Kluwer, a global provider of information services and solutions for professionals in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance and legal sectors, helped the company launch its TSoftPlus Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) offering near the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020.

TSoftPlus supports lender efforts to help small business customers get access to critical stimulus funding, helping retain more than one million U.S. workers’ jobs and thereby helping save many small businesses. Wolters Kluwer’s St. Cloud team delivered nine separate releases of TSoftPlus software upgrades over the course of 18 days when the product launched, working long hours to quickly add servers and optimize code to reduce performance bottlenecks. That’s an incredible timeline, because Wolters Kluwer normally issues software updates about once per quarter.