EUIPO announces the third edition of the DesignEuropa Awards. The DesignEuropa Awards, which celebrate excellence in design and design management, are now open for applications and nominations.
Organised by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), a decentralised agency of the EU, the DesignEuropa Awards honour outstanding design brought to the marketplace with the protection of the Registered Community Design (RCD). The RCD is an intellectual property right valid across the EU-28, administered by the EUIPO. Every year, thousands of businesses, from SMEs to multinationals, choose the RCD to protect their intellectual property rights in the EU. The DesignEuropa Awards, now in their third edition, underline the importance of design as a motor of economic growth. The nomination and application period for the DesignEuropa Awards runs from today, 21 October 2019, until 20 April 2020.
The DesignEuropa Awards categories are:
- The Industry Award: for RCDs owned by companies which have more than 50 employees and over EUR 10 million in turnover/balance sheet total
- The Small and Emerging Companies Award: for RCDs owned by companies which either fewer than 50 employees and less than EUR 10 million in turnover/balance sheet total or were established after January 1 2016, regardless of their size.
- The Lifetime Achievement Award: for individual designers with a significant body of aesthetic work, created over the course of a career, which has also had a demonstrable impact on the marketplace. Nominees in this category must currently use or have used the RCD system during their professional careers.
Previous winners of the DesignEuropa Awards include: legendary automobile designer Giorgietto Giugiaro (2016) and the creator of Apple’s first design language, Hartmut Esslinger (2018), both in the Lifetime Achievement Awards categories. The Small and Emerging category has been won by designs owned by Caimi Brevetti (2016) and Marcus Pedersen (2018), while the Industry Award has been won by designs owned by Thule (2016) and Siemens Healthcare GmbH (2018).
The Awards Ceremony will be held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, on 20 October 2020 in collaboration with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property.