European Inventor was awarded for the first time in 2006 on the initiative of the European Patent Office, with the support of the Commission and the Community Council. Every inventor with significant contribution to innovation, economy and society in Europe has the right to participate.
The participants compete in the following categories:
1. Industry
2. SMEs
3. Research
4. No-European Countries
5. Lifetime achievements
Every year The European Patent Office calls on its patent examiners and the examiners in the Patents offices in the Union to propose inventions, based on which is made a list of candidates. The participants are supposed to represent themselves in front of an international jury that defines three of them by category and eventually choose the winners. For the first time, this years has been given an opportunity for the public to vote for a winner of “Popular Prize” among the fifteen finalists.
(http://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/popular-prize.html )
This year’s awards will be given on 28 May in Amsterdam where special guest will be Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands.
The finalists:
• Industry
1. Jose Luis Lopez Gomez (Spain) - Method for optimising the guidance of trains
2. Claus Hommerle, Klaus Brustle (Austria) - Soft-close furniture hinge
3. Antonio Velez Marques, Helena Pereira, Rui Reis, Susana Silva (Portugal) - Process of expanding cork through microwave radiation
• Small and medium – sized enterprises
1. Bruno Berge (France) - Liquid lens with variable focal length
2. David Gow (United Kingdom) - Hand prosthesis with mechanically operable digits
3. Pal Nyren (Sweden) - Pyrosequencing, a DNA sequencing method
• Research
1. Patrick Couvreur, Barbara Stella, V?ronique Rosilio, Luigi Cattel (France) - Nano-capsules for targeted delivery of anti-cancer drugs
2. Jorg Horzel, Jozef Szlufcik, Mia Honore, Johan Nijs (Belgium, Germany) -
Photovoltaic cell with selectively diffused regions; Furnace for processing of a semiconductor substrate for the production of solar cells
3. Philipp Koehn, Daniel Marcu, Kevin Knight and William Wong (Germany, United Kingdom, USA) - Phrase-based joint probability model for statistical machine translation
• Non – European Countries
1. Ajay V. Bhatt, Bala Sudarshan Cadambi, Jeff Morriss, Shaun Knoll, Shelagh Callahan (USA) - Universal Serial Bus (USB)
2. Joseph M. Jacobson and Barrett Comiskey (United States)
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