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European Inventor Award 2016: prizes for trendsetting innovations from Germany

Press release of 10 June 2016

Lisbon/Munich. The European Inventor Award 2016 was presented on Thursday in the categories "Industry", "Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)", "Research", "Non-European countries", "Lifetime achievement" and as "Popular Prize". In as many as two categories, inventions from Germany were honoured this year. The award has been presented since 2006 on an annual basis by the European Patent Office.

Winners in the category "Industry"
Bernhard Gleich und Jürgen Weizenecker have developed a new method for magnetic particle imaging (MPI) as physicists at Philips Research Hamburg together with their team, which is used in medical diagnostics for different diseases and obtains three-dimensional images in real time and with high precision. The award recognises both the development of the method as well as its successful implementation in the market.

Winner in the category "Lifetime achievement"
Anton van Zanten was honoured for his path-breaking work in research and development of multiple safety systems in the automotive industry. During the many years he worked for Robert Bosch GmbH, the now 75-year-old engineer made driving - and thus the roads all over the world - much safer with his inventions, especially the electronic stability program (ESP) and the anti-lock braking system (ABS).

"We congratulate the winners and their teams very sincerely on this well-deserved honour," says Cornelia Rudloff-Schäffer, President of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA), about the presentation of the European Inventor Award. "The jury has honoured trendsetting innovations from Germany in the categories 'Industry' and 'Lifetime achievement'. This, once again, underlines the enormous potential our country has as a location for research and development," Rudloff-Schäffer continues. According to her, the constantly high patent application figures at the DPMA are also an important and clear sign for this.

For information about the European Inventor Awards as well as this year's winners, please go to http://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor.html.

The German Patent and Trade Mark Office

The DPMA is the federal centre of expertise in the field of IP protection in Germany. With a staff of over 2,500, it is the largest national IP office in Europe and the fifth largest national patent office in the world. The staff based at locations in Munich, Jena and Berlin grant patents, register trade marks, utility models and designs, and manage these IP rights. In addition, they provide information on IP rights to the public. For more information on the DPMA, please go to https://www.dpma.de.

For our current 2015 patent statistics, please go here.

Last updated: 19 December 2024