European Inventor of the Year

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The European Inventor of the Year awards are presented annually by the European Patent Office and the European Commission's DG Enterprise and Industry to inventors who have made a significant contribution to innovation in Europe. The winners in each category are presented with an award shaped like a sail. There is no cash prize associated with the awards.

Contents

[edit] Award categories

The European Inventor of the Year awards are presented in the following categories:

  • Industry
  • SMEs/research
  • Non-European inventors
  • Lifetime achievement

[edit] Nomination and selection

Each year the European Patent Office calls on its patent examiners to propose inventions for the award that were patented at the European Patent Office over a given ten-year period and have since made a significant contribution towards innovation in Europe.

A shortlist of nominees is then drawn up from the examiners' proposals and submitted to an international jury. The jury selects three inventors in each category for the final round, and eventually chooses the winners.

Some of the national patent offices in the member states of the European Patent Organisation, including Austria, Germany and France, have indicated an interest in contributing to the nominations, and the selection procedure may be changed for coming awards to take this into account.

[edit] European Inventor of the Year 2007

The second European Inventor of the Year awards took place at the International Congress Center in Munich, Germany on 18 April 2007. Prizes were presented to inventors - individuals and teams - in four categories.

The 2007 winners were:

  • Dr Franz Lärmer and Andrea Urban, of Bosch GmbH in Stuttgart, Germany, for their Bosch Process (category: industry)[1]
  • Catia Bastioli and her team at Novamont S.p.a in Novara, Italy, for inventing biodegradable plastics made from starch (category: SMEs/research)[2]
  • Dr Joseph P. Vacca and the team at Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, USA, for Crixivan, a protease inhibitor (category: non-European inventors)[3]
  • Professor Marc Feldmann from the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London, England, for identifying the role of cytokines in the treatment of autoimmune disorders (category: lifetime achievement)[4]

[edit] European Inventor of the Year 2006

The first European Inventor of the Year awards took place at the AutoWorld Museum in Brussels on 3 May 2006. Prizes were presented in six categories.

The 2006 winners were:

  • Zbigniew Janowicz and Cornelis Hollenberg, who invented a method for making proteins in Hansenula yeast (category: industry)[5]
  • Stephen P.A. Fodor, Michael C. Pirrung, J. Leighton Read and Lubert Stryer for their invention of the DNA chip (category: small and medium-sized enterprises)[6]
  • Peter Grünberg for his discovery of the giant-magnetoresistance effect, or GMR (category: universities and research institutes)[7]
  • John Starrett, Joanne Bronson, John Martin, Muzammil Mansuri and David Tortolani, for their prodrugs of phosphonates (category: new EU member states)[8]
  • Larry Gold and Craig Tuerk, who found out that nucleic acids can bind a protein to potentially intercept other proteins that cause diseases like AMD (category: non-European countries)[9]
  • Federico Faggin, for inventing the microprocessor (category: lifetime achievement)[10]

[edit] Jury

In 2007, the jury was made up of:

  • Nani Beccalli-Falco, President and CEO of GE International in Brussels, Belgium
  • Franjo Bobinac, President of the Management Board and CEO of Gorenje gospondinjski aparati in Velenje, Slovenia
  • Kastitis Gecas, Director of the Lithuanian Innovation Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania
  • N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor at Infosys Technologies Limited in Bangalore, India
  • Ruud Peters, Executive Vice President and CEO of Philips International in Eindhoven, The Netherlands
  • Edoardo Tusacciu, President of PlastWood s.r.l in Calangianus, Italy
  • Eugene van As, Chairman at Sappi Limited in Johannesburg, South Africa
  • Carmen Vela Olmo, Managing Director of INGENASA in Madrid, Spain
  • Professor Wang Zhibiao, President of the Chongqing Haifu Technology Co., Ltd in Chongqing, China

For the 2006 awards, the jury comprised:

  • Wim Kok, former Prime Minister, the Netherlands (chairman)
  • Gilles Capart, Chairman of PROTON Europe, Belgium
  • Dimitri F. Dimitriou, CEO of DyoDelta Biosciences, United Kingdom
  • Leif Edvinsson, Director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia, Sweden
  • Robert Peugot, Executive Vice President at PSA Peugeot-Citroën, France
  • Maive Rute, SME Envoy for the European Commission, Estonia


[edit] References

  1. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2007 in the category "Industry"
  2. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2007 in the category "SMEs/research"
  3. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2007 in the category "Non-European inventors"
  4. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2007 in the category "Lifetime achievement"
  5. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2006 in the category "Industry"
  6. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2006 in the category "Small and medium-sized enterprises"
  7. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2006 in the category "Universities and research institutes"
  8. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2006 in the category "New EU member states"
  9. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2006 in the category "Non-European countries"
  10. ^ European Inventor of the Year 2006 in the category "Lifetime achievement"

[edit] External links