All universities strive at research excellence and hope to offer particularly talented staff very good working conditions. For a few years, the ECIU consequently awarded an ECIU Young Researchers Prize as a supplement to what was already being done at the member institutions to foster research excellence. However, as activities within the ECIU Graduate School have grown and are of increasing importance to the Consortium, the ECIU will not be awarding such research prizes in future, but will investigate the opportunities of setting up similar activities within the framework of the ECIU Graduate School.

The prize was awarded for the first time in summer 2002 and was won by a young professor from Chalmers University, Christian Azar, based on work within the field of "Research for a sustainable society".

The 2004 prize topic was ” Research for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Challenges in the Academic Community or Wider Society for Industrial Design & Manufacturing, Technology Management & Entrepreneurship”. The prize jury decided, after long discussions, to award a joint second prize to Dr. Mathias Meyer, University of Dortmund, Germany and Torben Bach Pedersen, Aalborg University, Denmark. The rationale behind this joint second-prize was to indicate that there was room left for improvement with regards to the communications skills, which are considered essential in the prize awarding criteria. The third prize was awarded to Veronica Martinez based on her PhD from the University of Strahtlyde.

Veronica Martinez, Torben B. Pedersen and Matthias Mayer