The future belongs to inventors, and the rewards are huge

Wouldn’t you love to have been the person who invented the soft close hinge? Revenues for the furniture company that developed it run to more than €1 billion a year, helped along by that little hinge.

Or how about the guy who developed LCD technology, the stuff that makes your big screen TV work, or the inventor who came up with Bluetooth technology. All of these are past winners of the annual European Inventor Awards run by the European Patent Office, with this year's crop of hopefuls awaiting the big announcement in Berlin tomorrow.

The awards were introduced in 2006 as a way to pay tribute to the creativity of inventors across the world, says Oswald Schröder the European Patent Office's (EPO) principal director of communications.

The awards have proven hugely popular with the general public and resulted in 500 hours of television coverage worldwide last year. News broadcaster CNN says it is amongst the most popular programme it runs. Small wonder given the range of inventions that the completion manages to throw up each year.

The soft close hinge was one of the five category winners last year with the award going to Claus Hännerle and Klaus Brüstle of Austria. Switzerland’s Martin Schadt also won in 2013 as the inventor of LCD displays.

The 2012 awards celebrated Jaap Haartsen of the Netherlands for the invention of the Bluetooth wireless communications we use in our mobile phones and other devices. That year also saw Mario Polegato from Italy win for the invention of the vapour-permeable shoe, while the UK’s Joshua Silver took a prize for his self-adjusting eyeglasses which can change as the quality of your vision changes.

The inventions are always hugely varied, with many associated with medical treatments or new more effective drugs and others to do with information and communications technology, says Schröder. “We try to have a large spread of technologies to widen interest.”

Bids to enter come from three sources: the office’s own experts, patent examiners from national patent offices and from the public.

The EPO receives about 250,000 patent filings a year and this is whittled down to about 150,000 actual applications. These are further boiled down to 60,000 patents granted, says Schröder. Add in potential patents from countries outside the EPO’s remit and you can see the challenge involved getting into the final 300.

These in turn are reduced to just three shortlisted entries each for five categories which include: research, industry, SMEs, lifetime achievement and non-European.

In 2013 the EPO added the popular prize, encouraging the public to choose their favourite invention via social media. A collection of judges make the final decisions on who steps forward to claim a prize, each of them a noted inventor in their own right. Ernö Rubik, the inventor of the famous puzzle cube of the same name is on the judging panel.

The office introduced the awards programme as a way to show the importance of innovation, says Schröder. “Patents are perceived as a legal means to control ownership but they are an important investment tool and a support to innovation,” he says. “Patents are there to protect inventions but it is also a way to make the knowledge behind it publicly available so it is key to developing more innovation. We wanted to demonstrate that Europe cares about innovation. We also wanted to make innovation more visible and tangible.”

The 2014 award shortlist once again includes notable inventions, for example Charles Hull’s development of 3D printing based on work stretching back to 1983.

Philippe Cinquin, Serge Cosnier, Chantal Gondran and Fabien Giroud of France will be there with their invention, an implantable miniature fuel cell that transforms sugar from the body into electricity to power devices such as implanted pacemakers.

Thomas Tuschl of Germany developed a way to switch off human genes as an approach in turning off genes responsible for disease, winning him a place in the final 15. He is joined by Christofer Toumazou of the UK who invented a microchip that can read DNA, providing information about any known genetic disorders within minutes.

Cary Queen and Harold Selick of the US were selected for the final panel for their pioneering work in the area of humanised monoclonal antibody technology, used in cancer and other diseases. And Loen Andries of Belgium and Jerome Guillemont of France and their team are finalists through their development of an effective new drug to fight multi-resistant tuberculosis. Nine countries are represented amongst this year’s finalists. Patent offices are viewed as a way to keep people out but in reality they are meant to be letting people in, allowing people including other inventors an opportunity to build on the work of others, says Schröder.

The EPO has about 88 million files in its database, making it one of the most comprehensive collections of knowledge in the world. This material represents a resource that can be used to advance existing technologies and improve on the work of others. The European Patent Office, see epo.org