Celebrating Impact: SmartSkin Recognized for Innovation in New Brunswick
SmartSkin Wins the Impact Innovation Award at InnovateNB
SmartSkin Technologies was honoured to receive the Impact Innovation Award at the InnovateNB Award Ceremony, New Brunswick’s annual celebration of the innovators shaping our province’s technology and innovation ecosystem.
InnovateNB brings together the people and organizations accelerating progress in New Brunswick — highlighting groundbreaking achievements, showcasing local talent, and inspiring the next generation of innovators. Founded by leaders in the province’s innovation community including TechImpact, NBIF, the McKenna Institute (UNB), Propel, and regional economic development partners across Saint John, Fredericton, and Moncton, InnovateNB has become a powerful platform for recognizing the ideas and teams that are making a real difference. This year’s economic development partner, Envision Saint John: The Regional Growth Agency, helped bring the community together to celebrate our province’s momentum and growing impact.
To be recognized within this community — among so many companies and individuals doing extraordinary work — is deeply meaningful for our team.
What the Impact Innovation Award Recognizes
The Impact Innovation Award celebrates an organization that has developed a groundbreaking product, service, or business model that has generated significant economic impact in New Brunswick. The recipient has successfully commercialized innovation that has:
- created jobs,
- attracted investment, and
- strengthened New Brunswick’s competitive position regionally, nationally, or globally.
We’re proud that SmartSkin’s work in industrial diagnostics, proactive monitoring, and line optimization has been recognized not only for technical innovation, but for measurable economic and operational impact.
Accepting the Award
Our founder and CTO, Kumaran Thillainadarjah, accepted the award on behalf of SmartSkin at the ceremony. We were especially honoured to receive the Impact Innovation Award from ACOA — the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency — an organization that has supported SmartSkin in meaningful ways through funding and ongoing guidance.
ACOA works to create opportunities for economic growth across Atlantic Canada by helping businesses become more competitive, innovative, and productive. They also collaborate with diverse communities to develop and diversify local economies, while championing the strengths of the region. Their support has played an important role in helping SmartSkin grow and scale from New Brunswick to global markets, and we’re grateful to be recognized by a partner that shares our commitment to building high-impact innovation here at home.
Kumaran’s leadership — and the dedication of our entire team — has helped SmartSkin grow from a New Brunswick-born idea into a globally deployed solution that supports manufacturers in improving reliability, sustainability, and performance.
SmartSkin is a UNB spinout that's established itself with the global food, beverage and pharmaceutical brands as innovation leader, introducing a new concept of using Digital Container Twins to understand handling from the product’s perspective, allowing customers to improve productivity, reduce waste and increase quality. We are making a globally significant difference in the world and what we have built would not be possible without the support of the business community, entrepreneurs, our investors especially East Valley, Schott and BDC, as well as organizations like ACOA, NRC, ONB and UNB who helped us achieve our potential, so I think our success and this award is the recognition of what is possible when we work together and support entrepreneurs.
— Kumaran Thillainadarjah, Founder & CTO, SmartSkin Technologies
Why This Matters to Us (and to NB)
SmartSkin was built here in New Brunswick and has grown into a globally recognized company. Our growth has been shaped by the strength of the province’s innovation ecosystem. Being recognized by InnovateNB reinforces what we’ve believed from day one: world-class industrial innovation can be built, commercialized, and scaled from right here at home.
This award reflects where we’ve gotten and where we’re going next.
What Comes Next
As we look ahead, SmartSkin remains committed to expanding the economic and innovation ripple effect of our work in the province.
Over the next several years, SmartSkin plans to build on this momentum by:
- Continuing to scale high-value innovation, keeping core R&D and product leadership rooted in the province.
- Creating new opportunities for talent, including engineering, product, customer success, and operations roles.
- Expanding partnerships across the global innovation and manufacturing ecosystem, from research to commercialization.
- Attracting investment that fuels sustainable growth, helping showcase NB as a home for global industrial technology.
- Growing export impact, ensuring NB-built tech continues to compete and lead internationally.
Thank You
We want to extend our thanks to InnovateNB, its founding partners, and the judging panel for this honour — and to our clients, partners, and supporters across New Brunswick who’ve helped SmartSkin grow.
This award is a milestone. The work continues — and we’re only getting started.
