Ireland's Representative: The EPO Innovation Contest

When the email arrived saying I’d been selected to represent Ireland at the European Patent Office Innovation Contest, I assumed it was spam. Checked the sender address three times. Then I rang my mam. She said “that’s lovely, pet” in the tone she uses for things she doesn’t fully understand but is supportive of anyway.

So. The European Patent Office runs an annual innovation contest for young researchers across Europe. Each country sends a representative. Ireland picked me, which either says something nice about my work or something concerning about the applicant pool. I choose to believe the former.

The Concept

My entry was built around transparent phase change materials (PCMs) for building insulation. The idea is this: buildings waste an extraordinary amount of energy on heating and cooling. In the EU, buildings account for roughly 40% of total energy consumption. Traditional insulation (fibreglass, foam, wool) works by slowing heat transfer. It’s passive. It doesn’t store energy; it just makes the energy leak more slowly.

Phase change materials do something different. They absorb heat energy when they melt and release it when they solidify, like a thermal battery. Paraffin wax is a common PCM: when your room heats up, the wax melts and absorbs excess heat. When it cools down, the wax solidifies and releases that stored heat back. You get temperature smoothing for free.

The problem is that traditional PCMs are opaque. You can’t put paraffin wax in a window. And windows are where a huge amount of heat loss happens. A typical single-glazed window has a U-value of about 5.8 W/m²K, which in practical terms means it’s thermally useless.

My concept was for a transparent PCM that could be integrated into double-glazed window units. A clear material that would sit in the cavity between panes, absorbing solar energy during the day and releasing it at night. Transparent thermal storage in a window. The estimated energy saving was 15-25% on heating costs for a typical UK dwelling, which at average UK gas prices would save a household the bones of £150-200 per year.

The Contest

The European Patent Office is in Munich, and the contest ran over three days. There were representatives from 28 EU countries, plus Norway, Switzerland, and a few others. The format was: present your concept, defend it in a Q&A, and then network furiously while drinking surprisingly good German coffee.

Here’s where I should be honest: the level of competition was intimidating. The German representative had a working prototype of an AI-assisted drug discovery platform. The Dutch team had a novel desalination membrane. The Finnish entry was a biodegradable electronics substrate. And here’s me with a PowerPoint about windows.

But the thing about innovation contests is that judges care about impact as much as sophistication. Buildings are 40% of EU energy consumption. If you can reduce that by even a few percent across the entire building stock, the aggregate impact is enormous. My concept didn’t require new manufacturing processes. PCMs are already produced at industrial scale, around £8-15 per kilogram depending on the formulation. The novel bit was the transparency, which I’d been exploring through salt hydrate solutions that remain optically clear through their phase transition.

The Experience

I didn’t win. Let’s get that out of the way. The German AI drug discovery platform took the top prize, which was probably the right call.

But the experience was genuinely valuable, and not just as a line on the CV. Three things stood out:

First, explaining your work to a non-specialist audience is a skill. At Imperial, I present to people who know what a U-value is. At the EPO, I had to explain the concept to patent examiners, policy people, and fellow researchers from completely different fields. I rewrote my presentation six times to get the jargon out.

Quick tangent: patent examiners are fascinating people. They spend their careers reading the most innovative ideas in the world, assessing whether they’re genuinely novel, and then writing very precise legal documents about them. I talked to one examiner who’d reviewed patents for everything from satellite propulsion systems to improved toilet cisterns. “The cistern was more interesting,” she told me. I believe her.

Second, the scale of European research is humbling. Ireland is a small country. We produce excellent research, but when you’re in a room with 30+ countries, each fielding their best young researcher, you realise how much is happening that you never see in your own institution’s seminar series.

Third, Munich is extremely expensive. My per diem was €75 a day and I still managed to overspend. Between meals, coffee, and the odd evening out, the costs add up quickly in a city centre.

Back to the PhD

The PCM work was somewhat tangential to my PhD, which is focused on energy harvesting for wireless sensors rather than building insulation. But the underlying theme is the same: energy storage, efficiency, and the gap between theoretical performance and real-world behaviour. PCMs degrade with repeated thermal cycling, just like batteries degrade with repeated charge-discharge cycles. The pattern keeps repeating.

Julie’s feedback when I got back was characteristically direct: “Good experience. Now get back to your actual research.” Fair enough. But representing Ireland at a European level, even without winning, gave me a confidence boost I didn’t know I needed. Sometimes it’s worth stepping outside your lane just to see the view from someone else’s.

And the transparent PCM idea? Someone will make it work eventually. The physics is sound. The economics are favourable. The engineering is just hard. Which, come to think of it, describes about 90% of everything worth doing.