With exactly 909 patents registered at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (GPTO), ZF broke a new world record in 2014. This made it that much more difficult for the jury to sort through this year's pile of applications for the ZF Graf-von-Soden Invention Award and select only six winners.
ZF honored the outstanding employee inventions: Advanced hybrid concepts and continuously variable off-road machinery transmissions meet weight-reducing, steerable rear axles while easy fingertip gear selection per touchscreen meet systems that make the downsizing driveline even quieter.
The annual Graf-von-Soden Invention Award has been a long-established benchmark in this effort. The award was presented for the third time in 2015, focusing on six new outstanding inventions from ZF employees – one from each division or strategic business unit and one from Corporate Research and Development. The jury had selected them from among all ZF patent registrations that were published the previous year and, which alone at the GPTO, hit a new record number of 909.
