European Inventor
Award 2015

Paris between Tradition and Future
VOK DAMS stages 10th European Inventor Award

This year witnesses the 10th European Inventor Award, which was initiated in 2006 by the European Patent Office (EPO). A special tradition also for VOK DAMS, who have supported this event since 2007.

This year, the prize was awarded in the heart of Paris. 400 guests from politics, economy and science attended the grand ceremony at the Palais Brongniart, the symbolic building and historic stock exchange of Paris.

The European Inventor Award is the most important award for innovation in Europe. With this award, individual inventors and teams of inventors are recognized, whose inventions contribute to finding answers to the most important challenges of our time. An international, high profile panel examines, whether these inventions contribute towards the social development, the creation of jobs and towards the prosperity of Europe.

The public, too, is invited to participate in the award ceremony. Via online-voting, they can determine the winner of the audience award, the popular prize, from the 15 finalists.

In the five categories the following awards were presented: Andreas Manz (CH) for his lifetime achievement, Franz Amtmann (AT) / Philippe Maugars (FR) in the category “Industry”, Laura van 't Veer (NL) in “Small and Middle-sized Enterprises” (SME)", Ludwik Leibler (FR) in “Research” and Sumio Iijima / Akira Koshio / Masako Yudasaka (JP) in the category “Non-European Countries".

The popular prize was awarded to the Australian immunologist Ian Frazer and his deceased Chinese colleague Jian Zhou for the first vaccine against cervical cancer.