BEING at the cutting edge brought a double triumph for the winner of the Business Innovation of the Year Award.

The team from York-based ecommerce specialist PureNet had already stepped up to the stage to collect the Technology title earlier in the evening.

Chief executive Paul Gibson said it was “amazing” to have won two awards at the event.

He noted that a number of other finalists present that evening had, like PureNet, been based at some stage at York Science Park - whose chief executive, Tracey Smith, had won the Business Personality title - while some others were customers of PureNet.

The judges said the company’s winning entry centred on its new e-commerce development, Pure Clarity.

This applied sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques to online shopping in a way which the judges said was world-leading.

The results of four years’ work, it was being rolled out to clients in a careful and systematic way and had the potential to be very successful,they added.

One of its early clients had experienced an 86 per cent increase in turnover, and the judges said PureNet came across as a business committed to long-term and continual innovation.

PureNet says it specialises in two areas. The first is complex, business-critical websites, while the second is based on PureClarity providing ecommerce personalisation to boost sales.

CBT Clinics was founded by a former NHS cognitive behavioural therapist who had grown tired of long waiting lists, and the company now had a network of about 2,000 practitioners who delivered therapy over the phone or using media such as Skype.

The work done by Drax Power to switch to bio-renewable fuels from coal, so that now 70 per cent of its energy was produced from wood pellets, was described by the judges as being on an epic scale and truly impressive.