Dinesh Watawana has been awarded as the ‘Most Innovative Entrepreneur’ by the Federation of Chambers of Commerce & Industry at the 24th Sri Lankan Entrepreneur of the Year Awards held at the BMICH.
Watawana’s ability to inspire innovation across the business field, bridging wealth creation with sustainable development channels the corporate world into a new axis with his recognition at the Sri Lanka entrepreneur awards offering a vote of confidence to a battered economy. His award-winning business nexus, according to Watawana, is an advertisement for doing business in the COVID-19 era with a call to businesses to re-imagine their future on societal needs.
Having inspired a plethora of Sri Lankan brands to stardom, his brand development and communications agency ‘The 7th Frontier’ first went off the beaten track in the year 2005 with a brief to put Sri Lanka on the world map of tourism during the height of the war. Kumbuk River not only became an instant international hit winning the Travel Oscar as the world’s leading eco-lodge, as well as, being named among the World’s Top 10 Most Unusual Hotels. He pioneered what would turn out to be one of the world’s first attempts to adopt the universal concept of building brands on creating shared value.
While working on external brands including several iconic blue-chips, Dinesh Watawana built an in-house model of business bringing together expertise in brand building, modern media, sustainable development, conservation and psychology giving new meaning to diversity and resilience. Watawana’s emergence as a developmental catalyst saw him re-modelling the concept of value creation through the advent of the Geo Explore Foundation.
The panel of judges which included some of Sri Lanka’s most respected professionals recognized Watawana’s far-reaching business philosophy with four awards which also included, in addition to the joint winner as Sri Lanka’s most innovative entrepreneur of the year 2019, as a national winner in the category of Sri Lankan Entrepreneur of the year, and insightful decision of the judges, considering his decision not to grow in size but allowing the freedom to experiment with his business ideology which allows him to contribute as a catalyst of transformation on the national scene.
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