Order of European Inventors and Innovators
Invention fairs are usually treated as pleasant exhibitions where medals are handed out. The judgement is unfair, and unfair in a way that says something about us.
For a researcher at a large university, an invention fair really is a secondary event: they have conferences, journals, a network. For the individual inventor — the schoolteacher with a patent, the engineer who built something in his own workshop — the fairs are often the only place where he can be seen.
EUROINVENT
In Iași, at the Palace of Culture, the European Exhibition of Creativity and Innovation — EUROINVENT — is held every year. It is organised by the Romanian Inventors Forum together with Europe Direct Iași, the “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University and the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, and it presents itself as the largest event of its kind in Eastern Europe. A recent edition exhibited over 690 inventions and projects.
It has four sections, and their combination is less usual than it looks: the exhibition of inventions and research, an international conference, a salon of technical, scientific and artistic books, and a European visual art exhibition. Few events in the field place technical creation next to artistic creation — and anyone who has read what I wrote about inventics between science and art will understand why that is not a decorative pairing.
The network behind them
The fairs are not isolated events. There is an international structure that links them: IFIA, the International Federation of Inventors’ Associations, founded in London on 11 July 1968 by representatives of seven European countries — Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.
It is now based in Geneva, brings together some 175 member organisations from over 100 countries, and holds observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization and at UNCTAD, consultative status with UNIDO, and special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council since 2019. It sits on the standing advisory committee before the European Patent Office.
In other words: the system for recognising inventors exists internationally, is almost six decades old, and is connected to the institutions that set the rules of intellectual property. What is usually missing is the link between it and the inventor in his own town.
What a medal is actually good for
Not what people think. A medal at an international fair does not sell the invention and does not convince a manufacturer.
It does three real things. It dates — there is public, witnessed proof that the solution existed on that day. It opens a door — an email signed by someone holding an international distinction is answered more often than an unsigned one. And it changes how its holder sees himself, which, for someone who has worked alone for years, is not a sentimental detail but the condition of carrying on.
What would be worth changing
A fair does half its job if it ends with the prize-giving. The other half is what happens in the months afterwards: who connects the awarded invention with the firm that has the problem, who helps with filing the patent in other countries, who checks where the solution got to two years later.
That part is not the organisers’ responsibility — they already do more than falls to them. It belongs to what I have called elsewhere the link that breaks.