www.epo.org

The European Inventor Award of the European Patent Office (EPO) recognises inventors from all over the world who translate their ideas into technological progress, economic growth or improvements to everyday life. In 2023, more than 600 candidates from 12 countries were proposed who were indicated as inventors in at least one European patent granted.

The European Inventor Award is presented in five categories. The award winners of 2024 were:

• Industry: The “Giga Press“ developed by the Italian Fiorenzo Dioni and the German Richard Oberle is the world’s largest die-casting machine and applies especially high pressure. The press is an important step towards reducing waste, energy consumption and carbon emissions resulting from the production of large vehicle parts.
  DPMA President Eva Schewior emphasises: “Congratulations to Richard Oberle and Fiorenzo Dioni! With the new technology, they are enabling an innovative approach in order to make automotive manufacturing even more efficient.”
• Research: The European Inventor Award 2024 in the “Research” category went to the German AI researcher Cordelia Schmid. She was awarded for her pioneering “computer vision” research, which enables AI to “see“ and interpret complex visual data in real-time. This opens up new application possibilities, for example for interactive robots and self-driving vehicles.
  DPMA President Eva Schewior: “My heartfelt congratulations go to Cordelia Schmid for being awarded with the European Inventor Award. Cordelia Schmid is an outstanding scientist and inventor. Using self-improving machine learning models, she has decisively advanced the processing speed of AI applications in computer vision — thus pushing the boundaries of what technology can achieve for our lives. Economically and socially highly relevant applications such as autonomous driving and interactive robotics have only become possible because of this.”
  Cordelia Schmid is Research Director of the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA). She is one of the internationally leading researchers in computer vision and co-author of numerous scientific research papers and patent applications.
• Non-EPO Countries: Neodymium-iron-boron (Nd-Fe-B) magnets have greatly changed the field of permanent magnets and have become an indispensable component of today’s modern technologies. The strongest variety, namely Sintered NdFeB magnets, was developed by materials scientist Masato Sagawa from Japan.
• SMEs and Popular Prize: The printable perovskite solar cells developed by Olga Malinkiewicz and her team from Poland are characterised by their light weight and high flexibility. These two important features have the potential to raise the world-wide generation of electricity retrieved from renewable energy sources to a new level.
• Lifetime Achievement: The native mass spectrometry developed by the British chemist Dame Carol Robinson has revolutionised our understanding of proteins in their natural environment and paved the way for advances in the fields of drug discovery and personalised medicine.

Young Inventors Prize:

• The portable test kit by Rochelle Niemeijer was devised to quickly diagnose bacterial infections using state-of-the-art medical technology in order to address the pressing issue of antimicrobial resistance.
• A pioneering technology transforms autumn leaves into environmentally friendly paper, thus avoiding deforestation and significantly lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The innovative process was developed by Valentyn Frechka from Ukraine.
• MOOVOBRAIN is a smart all-in-one solution for wheelchair control helping people with physical limitations navigate. It was conceived by Khaoula Ben Ahmed, Ghofrane Ayari, Souleima Ben Temime and Sirine Ayari from Tunesia.

From 2025 on, the Young Inventors Award will be awarded separately and alternate annually with the European Inventor Award by the European Patent Office.

www.innovationspreis-bayern.de (in German)

The Bavarian Innovation Prize is awarded every two years. It honours product and process innovations as well as technology-oriented services that were developed in Bavaria and launched on the market no more than four years ago.

At the 2024 awards ceremony, the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Federation of Bavarian Chambers of Industry and Commerce (Bayerischer Industrie- und Handelskammertag) and the Federation of Bavarian Chambers of Crafts (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der bayerischen Handwerkskammern) once again honoured several companies for their outstanding new developments. Vice-President Bernd Maile was a member of the jury. The assessments of several patent examiners of the DPMA were also included in the evaluation.

At the award ceremony, the chairman of the jury, Prof Dr Dr h.c. (NAS RA) Arndt Bode emphasised the important role of the DPMA in selecting the award winners. The valuable information on the existing IP rights of the more than 150 submissions and the DPMA's well-founded assessment of their novelty and degree of innovation was “decisive”, it was said at the award ceremony in Munich.

You can find the prize winners of each category on the website of the Bavarian Innovation Prize.

www.innovationspreis-thueringen.de (in German)

The Thuringia Innovation Award is regarded as a benchmark for ground-breaking new developments and inventions and honours outstanding innovations. It comes with a reward of 110,000 euros which makes it one of the awards with the highest prize money in Germany and was awarded for the 27th time in 2024.

The awards were presented jointly by the Thuringian Minister of Economic Affairs Wolfgang Tiefensee, the Foundation for Technology, Innovation and Research of Thuringia (STIFT), TÜV Thüringen and the Ernst Abbe Foundation in Weimar on 4 December 2024.

The DPMA was again represented in the 18-member jury by Markus Ortlieb, Head of the Jena sub-office.

The winners of the individual categories can be found on the website of the Thuringia Innovation Award.

www.jugend-forscht.de

This year’s round of the Jugend forscht contest included a total of 10,492 young participants from STEM fields. One of the aims of the contest is to motivate girls to conduct research in mathematical and technical fields in order to equalise the gender distribution in technical and scientific subjects. Girls accounted for 39.8% of the young scientists. The proportion of girls is still highly dependent on the subject area, with the highest proportion in biology at 58% and the lowest in technology at 19%. Of the 107 projects that made it to the national competition, Maja Leber and Julius Gutjahr received the Chancellor’s award. Their project about inverse bubbles was awarded as the most original contribution. Every child knows soap bubbles — but Maja and Julius made drops fall deliberately through a glass tube into a water basin. When the drop meets the water surface, it is immured by a thin air layer. This creates an inverted bubble which is referred to as an anti-bubble. By making videos and analysing them, Maja and Julius were able to find out which dropping heights and tube diameters were needed for the most successful creation of the anti-bubbles.

The national winner in the technology category was Ediz Osman. He developed an innovative vertical take-off concept for civil planes which cleverly combines four engines. This leads to an upward thrust when the plane is rising as well as to a forwards thrust, thus enabling energy-saving long-distance flights. The junior scientist was even able to demonstrate some components and flight phases of the concept using a model.

Maja, Julius and Ediz were sent to participate in the 35th European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) in Katowice (Poland) with their projects, where each of them succeeded in winning an award. We congratulate the talented winners and wish them continued success!