Horizon 2020 project ARIES aims to improve the performance, availability and sustainability of particle accelerators, transferring its benefits and applications to science and society.

In September 2019, CERN, the foundation Commodity Risk Management Expertise Centre (CORMEC) and the Wageningen University signed an agreement to develop new methods for identifying anomalies that can harm the integrity of commodity and financial markets.

Two other projects initiated with the support of the CERN Medical Applications budget were quickly adapted to COVID-19 research: CAFEIN and MARCHESE.

The collaboration agreement between CERN and ESA, signed in July 2019, addresses the challenge of operating in harsh radiation environments found in both particle-physics facilities and outer space.

The Knowledge Transfer group at CERN initiated a pilot programme in collaboration with the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), with the purpose of exploring how cutting-edge Israeli companies and institutes can embrace specific CERN technologies and know-how to fuel innovation and drive positive impact in society.

One of the Knowledge Transfer (KT) group’s priorities is to foster a culture of entrepreneurship at CERN. This is made possible throughactivities such as the Business Incubation Centre (BIC) network and programmes like the CERN Entrepreneurship Student Programme (CESP) and the NTNU and BIC screening weeks.

In November 2018, an ESA-led team came to CERN to test many space components with one of the most energetic radiation beams available on earth: the lead-ion beam delivered by CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator.

The High Energy Ventilator (HEV), first prototyped in March 2020 by a team of physicists from the LHCb collaboration, was designed as a fully functional, high-quality medical ventilator for use in and out of intensive care units.

As part of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a team led by physicists and engineers from the LHCb collaboration has proposed a design for a novel ventilator.

IGLUNA is an educational project aimed at investigating the realisation of a human habitat on the moon. 18 student teams from all over Europe, built several technology demonstrators for this habitat.

CERN started manufacturing face masks and shields early on during the pandemic.

Intellectual property (IP) lies at the core of successful knowledge transfer at CERN, allowing CERN to manage scientific and technological developments for maximum impact in society. One example is the CERN Open Hardware Licence (OHL).

In 2020, Zenodo, the open-data repository developed by CERN with co-funding from the European Commission, was upgraded with additional storage and a dedicated community for COVID-19 research.

PlanetWatch, a CERN spin-off, aims to provide a solution to generate, validate, analyse and record air quality data. Their environmental sensor uses the CERN technology C2MON.

Terabee SAS, a start-up supported by the French BIC Innogex, developed the proximity-sensing device Proximeter, based on CERN’s miniIoT (Internet of Things) technology.

Zenuity, a company developing software solutions for automotive safety and autonomous driving (AD), has become the first to team up with CERN in the fields of fast machine learning.