EU hoping to boost innovation through awards

The EU has created a new annual award for the best European invention in the hope that it will inspire other innovators.

The European Inventor awards were launched on Tuesday by the European commission and the European patent office .

The list of nominees for the awards includes Europeans, Australians and Americans and individuals or teams from telecommunications, information technology and medicine.

“We want to demonstrate that European capacity to innovate is still very strong” said EU industry commissioner Günter Verheugen.

“We hope that this will be the start of a trend  because innovation and knowledge are at the heart of competitiveness.”

The commissioner also stressed the importance of innovation - and intellectual property rights - in boosting the EU economy and creating jobs.

He said that patent numbers in the EU were low compared to the US and Japan, and that there was increasing competition from emerging nations such as China and India.

But the EU is still struggling to agree on a new European patent scheme that would be cheaper and simpler than the 25 national schemes currently in place.

Internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy  launched a new consultation on the dossier back in January and hopes to have a new patent scheme in place by 2009.

But there are still major disagreements on a number of key issues, not least the language that should be used for the simplified EU patent.

Talks have been deadlocked since 2000 because of legal wrangling over translation and interpretation issues.

There is also disagreement about the cost of patents, with some countries earning considerable sums every time an innovation is patented.

EU charges range from €37,000 to €57,000 per patent, compared to €10,000 in the US, and the commission believes that this is a major barrier to European innovation growth.

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