nowEurope

At this year’s IST conference in the Hague it was already the tenth time when the European Prizes were awarded for innovative products in the field of Information Society Technologies - the European IST Prize. The competition supported by the European Commission is open for any organisation developing products with a high market potential and evidently applicable in industry and society. It is expected that practical application of R&D results on the market will have also a positive impact on society (employment, creation of new markets, increase of global competitiveness, etc.).

For the occasion of the yearly European IST Conference 70 Nominees are selected, among them 20 are selected as Winners, and then among them three Grand Prize Winners are awarded (each Grand Prize Winner receives EUR 200,000). All Winners have a chance to exhibit their products in the European IST Prize Winners Village. From 1995 up to 2004 altogether 3145 companies from 33 countries applied to the competition, out of them 220 European IST Prize Winners and 27 European IST Grand Prize Winners were selected (three Grand Prize Winners selected in 2004 will be awarded in January 2005). According to the organisers on average a European IST Prize Winner company creates 25 jobs per year and doubles its turnover every second year. 80% of the Winners are SMEs.

This year 430 applicants from 29 countries participated in the competition, where France has the strongest participation with 59 applications followed by Netherlands with 47 applicants. Let’s pick from the winning products for example the tactile computer mouse (with multimedia features) enabling blind people to ’see’ images with their finger-tips, by the Israel company VirTouch; a Contactless smartcard with integrated PIN pad for secure user verification over the Internet by the Swedish company Cypak and last but not least 3D projector enabling projecting in the air and walking through pictures by the Swedish company FogScreen. The majority of awarded projects were from the field of graphics (7), security (5), virtual reality (2) and Internet technologies (2).

When looking at the total numbers of Winners in the last decade there is a big difference between two groups of countries easily noticeable - the table is led by France and Germany far ahead, and UK and Sweden also managed to get over the average of two victories per year. The rest of Europe follows only with a considerable distance (more in the overview table below). If we look closer at the new member countries, we disclose that all awards they gained only before 2000. Do the last four annuals of the competition reflect the situation in development priorities in the economic and social environment in these countries? Or did at that time the Selection Committee dedicate more attention to the accession countries and now it is not necessary any more? Or in other words - don’t the products from this region deserve this attention any more when compared to others?

Numbers of IST Prize Winners according to individual countries:

Notes:

Stars indicate number of Grand Prize Winners.

From year 2000, to allow the Nominees, Winners and Grand Prize Winners to benefit from their nomination for a full year they have been named for the year following their nomination.