For more than 20 years this magazine has recognized innovation with the FinOvation Award. The honorees are chosen based on your specific interest in their innovations and not every product we feature gets the nod. It's a challenge we happily accept.

But there's a second part to that program, one that's very public, and it's the voting for the Product of the Year. What was once a simple "popularity" contest has grown to have great importance to the companies that are honored as part of the program. It's a serious endeavor. And along comes the 2016 award, and an internal glitch with our voting system.

Sure we had a lot of interest.

Sure we got a lot of votes.

Yet there was a problem with the system, not associated with any companies or the voters. At the end of the day, we had a polling system that wasn't built for getting the correct result. For the companies involved, there's disappointment. For this blogger there's disappointment.

We're going back to the drawing board for 2017, where we will have a totally different way to measure your interest to choose the Product of the Year.

For the companies at the top of the poll when we shut it down - we recognize you may be disappointed, but dear reader please know that the problem with our system created anomalous results. All 22 of the honorees have innovative products, and those that voted were aiming to choose the best, but the system wasn't recording everything the way it should.

End result, we cannot name a Product of the Year, so you won't be seeing anything online about that later this week after our awards banquet at the National Farm Machinery Show. But like anything in agriculture when you have a system failure you go back to the drawing board, and you rethink things and move on.

In anything in life there are failures, and for FIN it was the online voting tool. So thanks to those of you who voted, and we welcome you back for 2017 if you find products you like. We're just not going to be able to count any of the votes we received this year.

And we're not happy either. But onward and upward.