The awards will be presented during the IPTEC meeting, to be held on June 11 and 12 this year, in Frankfurt’s Steigenberger Airport Hotel.

The awards recognize companies and institutions with an outstanding record in technology transfer, and the winners are chosen by the IPTEC Advisory Board.

Three awards will be presented – one to a leading university, one to a leading public organization and one to a leading private-sector organization.

This year, the nominees for the university category are: Columbia University, Imperial Innovations, MIT, University of Leuven and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The nominees in the public sector category are: Fraunhofer Institute, Max Planck Innovation, National Institutes of Health and Wellcome Trust.

In the private sector, the nominees are: ARM, Cancer Research Tech, Dolby Labs, EMBL, HP, Procter & Gamble, Qualcomm, Smart Materials and Texas Instruments.

Previous winners of the IPTEC awards were, in 2006, Stanford University, the European Space Agency and IBM and, in 2007, Tsinghua University, NASA and Thomson.

This year’s IPTEC conference, which is organized in association with Managing IP, will feature presentations from companies including QinetiQ, Max Planck Innovation, DSM, Ericsson, CERN and Kodak among others.

IPTEC will also feature new technology presentations, in which inventors and companies present technologies available for licensing, as well as an exhibition and networking opportunities.

More details on registration are available on the IPTEC website.