EARTO Innovation Awards 2017

Published on 16/10/2017

The European Association of Research and Technology Organisations (EARTO) organised the EARTO Innovation Awards 2017 held on 11 October at the BELVue Museum in Brussels (BE). In this context, the Innovation Awards brochure 2017 - including a tool developed at LIST - was presented to EARTO members.

The annual EARTO Innovation Awards is a competition created in 2009, which highlights the vasious areas of RTO’s activities and illustrates their concrete contributions to innovation with high societal and/or economic impact through two categories: “Impact Delivered”and “Impact Expected”. The Award is open to all EARTO members and each year an independent jury evaluates entries and selects the winners. The prize is awarded at a special ceremony in Brussels with wide political and stakeholder participation.

This year the EARTO Innovation Awards 2017 winners were Fraunhofer for the Impact Expected category; an innovative production process using compressed CO2 to tan leather without using chromium as tanning agent and with no waste water; and for the Impact Delivered category: Tecnalia, an innovative system which uses Big Data to predict the expected behaviour and detect future failure of a company’s key assets such as wind turbines or train wheels.

Focus on VECTOR500 LIST technology

On the same day, EARTO has published the 2017 edition of its “Innovation Awards” brochure, a collection of innovations featuring EARTO members, which gives a flavour of the wide range of RTOs’ work. LIST’s innovative technology VECTOR500 is listed in the brochure, together with the thirty-one innovations from other EARTO members.

VECTOR500, is an innovative tool allowing for the first time the investigation of complex micro and nano-structured samples with a world record resolution of 10nm, which is 10,000 times smaller than a human hair and a 5 times better resolution compared to existing instruments. It also enables to identify and analyse the chemical composition of substances with innovative efficiency. This technology can open new doors to understanding the fundamental questions of how material behave on the nano-scale.

All innovations presented at the EARTO Awards, demonstrate RTOs’ capacity to support Europe’s innovation performance and their focus on solving today’s challenges and delivering impact.

>> Download the EARTO Innovation Awards 2017 brochure or visit the EARTO official website.