The 2025 Contest is Now Open for Entries!
Submit your best new product ideas in any of seven categories for a chance at $25,000 USD and other great prizes. Here’s how to get started.
Help build a better tomorrow
Since Tech Briefs magazine launched the Create the Future Design contest in 2002 to recognize and reward engineering innovation, over 15,000 design ideas have been submitted by engineers, students, and entrepreneurs in more than 100 countries. Join the innovators who dared to dream big by entering your ideas today.
Read About All the 2024 Winning Inventions
Special Report spotlights the eight amazing winners in 2024 as well as honorable mentions in each category, plus the top ten most popular entries as voted by our community.
Click here to read moreA ‘Create the Future’ Winner Featured on ‘Here’s an Idea’
Spinal cord injury affects 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. A research team at NeuroPair, Inc. won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Create the Future Design Contest for a revolutionary approach to spinal cord repair. In this Here’s an Idea podcast episode, Dr. Johannes Dapprich, NeuroPair’s CEO and founder, discusses their groundbreaking approach that addresses a critical need in the medical field, offering a fast and minimally invasive solution to a long-standing problem.
Listen nowThank you from our Sponsors
“At COMSOL, we are very excited to recognize innovators and their important work this year. We are grateful for the opportunity to support the Create the Future Design Contest, which is an excellent platform for designers to showcase their ideas and products in front of a worldwide audience. Best of luck to all participants!”
— Bernt Nilsson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, COMSOL, Inc.
“From our beginnings, Mouser has supported engineers, innovators and students. We are proud of our longstanding support for the Create the Future Design Contest and the many innovations it has inspired.”
— Kevin Hess, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Mouser Electronics
contest
Contest
Problem
Bicycles depend on sustainable and clean energy and are good for health or fitness. One of the limitation of cycling is that it required human effort or energy to drive it. Long distance cycling need a great amount of a driver’s energy and the journey becomes full of anxiety and tiredness.
Thanks to its dramatic improvements in aircraft ground collision avoidance, this technology can save the lives of ~100 people each year in the U.S. alone by preventing what is called controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). Accounting for nearly 20% of general aviation deaths, CFIT occurs when a distracted or incapacitated pilot flies a fully functioning aircraft into the ground.
This technology provides an unprecedented level of accuracy in measuring liquid levels, overcoming the many limitations associated with currently available methods. This capability is crucial in various industries that require liquid level measurement within large containers or for materials that are difficult to measure (e.g., cryogenic liquids).How It Works:
Developed at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center,
No present equipment effectively extracts energy from slow speed shallow tidal, river, or other slow moving or shallow water. Also axial turbines can kill fish.
The appended device data describes a new low speed pancake horizontal turbine design which uses large horizontal blades on the streaming side, which autofold on the return side,
This optical waveguide FBG technology can be used as a sensor to detect and map magnetic fields. Alternately, a known magnetic field can be applied to create a particular optical transmission behavior in the waveguide, thus creating an optical switch or selective filter.
The FBG’s waveguide material is sensitive to an external magnetic field,
Capable of encoding massive amounts of data into a package more than 1,000 times smaller than with standard compression, this technology is poised to revolutionize the use of digital terrain maps (DTMs) in restricted environments (e.g., tablets, smart phones, embedded systems).Developed at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center,
KneeBooster®
When your knee cannot bear your weight without pain, you reach out for help. Some of the available options other than pain relief drugs are:
- Crutches: can do the job but are very cumbersome and limiting
- Widely advertised “wrap around knee braces”: are helpful in some cases but do not have the load bearing function.
An automotive Virtual Side View Mirror (VSVM), which uses a closed-circuit video system to generate images of the sides of a vehicle and present the images to the driver in a manner to improve traffic “situational awareness.” Benefits include: improved safety, reduced noise/vibration, reduced fuel consumption, and increased styling freedom.
Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle seat that acts with a pendulum motion to reduce the likelihood of a passenger impacting the seat/structure in front of her during crash loadings.
Summary
In various modes of transportation, many passenger seats are at least partially surrounded by walls or monuments or may be placed behind other passenger seats.
The next step for a more “intelligent” traffic control system is to make the traffic light communicate with the cars. Now it sends a message to the drivers through color light, it signals to the driver, 3 options in a standard accepted format: green, yellow and red. But, what if it can give more information to the cars,
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