EUREKA AWARDS

Since 2009 the EUREKA Innovation Award rewards the best of European cooperation in Research and Development.

With this reward EUREKA recognises the outstanding technological achievments of an R&D performing organisation as the leading force behind an innovative project chosen on the basis of business results and societal impact.

Organised every year, the EUREKA Innovation Award ceremony takes place during high visibility events of the EUREKA network such as conferences gathering research ministers or parliamentarians from all over Europe.

In 2011, the EUREKA Innovation Award has been handed over to the 25 years old Monika Kavaliauske, Manager at JSC Biocentras, a Lithuanian SME, which led the E! 2522 OPTISOIL CLEAN project, an innovative and biological solution for oil spills.

This year’s EUREKA Innovation award will be for outstanding candidates that have successfully launched a commercial application generated as a direct result of a EUREKA project in food-related technologies.

The project should be within this technology area and should not have started before 2004 and must have ended no later than end 2010.

Revenues of a minimum of EUR 200,000 must have been generated as a direct result of the product of the research conducted in the project (proof of such revenues may be requested by the award jury).

Priority will be given to projects fulfilling one or more of the following conditions:  
>   Contributing to the production of healthy foods;
>   Securing and increasing food safety;
>  Market introduction and sales in a country(ies) other than those of the product’s origin;
> Successful IPO (initial public offering) or PP (private placement);
>   Addressing inter-regional challenges;
>   Multidisciplinary.

These conditions most accurately reflect a priority of the Hungarian EUREKA Chairmanship year, increasing interest in and the value of EUREKA as an instrument for tackling one of the ‘Grand Challenges’ that the European Innovation Union is committed to solving by 2020, through a series of large-scale European partnerships.