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
Vision Intelligence Traffic Automated Lights
The VITAL system will controls traffic lights based on vision sensors and analysis of information. Will help to make traffic more fluid, generating savings to drivers and reducing unnecessary pollution by reducing gas consumption.
The system will be based on “Intelligent” nodes. A node on each street intersection, “an Intelligent traffic control officer,
My proposal is for an underwater combat simulation game called SEACOM-2013 Extreme Aquatic Games. I design and build shallow water pure Oxygen Rebreather diving equipment for recreational use. US Navy SEALS use a similar (but more advanced) diving system. The paintball, laser-tag, and AirSoft combat simulation community has grown recently in popularity,
“Squeezzz Lane”
(The Virtual Car Pool Lane)
Copyright 2012
Joe Anderson – Illinois, USA
Roads in cities around the world are becoming more congested. The demand for travel exceeds the capacity of our existing roads. Cash and land shortages restrict governments’ ability to expand roads.
The Vanquish is a scalable unmanned aerial vehicle, designed to transport personnel, wounded personnel and equipment and can perform surveillance and scout/attack missions. Though the vehicle was primarily designed for the Military, it has many civilian uses, especially in areas of medical evacuation and emergency supplies delivery in remote and dangerous areas.
The Vanquish is a coaxial-rotor,
The MXC form factor from WOLF Industrial Systems specifically targets the high-end video requirements of analog, digital, and broadcast SMPTE inputs and outputs, video mixing and overlay, H.264 compression, and AES encryption.
The Manta Ray Unmanned Underwater Riverine Craft (UURC) is designed to perform clandestine, persistent surveillance in riverine, inlets, harbors, and other coastal shallow water environments as well as providing a platform that can provide extended time-on-station research.
The Manta Ray is an Unmanned Underwater Systems (UUS) designed to operate in harsh environments (obstacles, weeds, shallow water, etc).
SpinDyne's "Shields Brother's Engine"
If public and private transportation vehicles were powered by an engine which would be significantly more economical without sacrificing power, less costly to manufacture, less costly to maintain, quieter, and naturally low in all forms of vehicular emissions, the quality of life would be greatly enhanced.
The omni-IDE is a versatile, comprehensive “software defined” electronic appliance that serves as a core platform for a wide range of embedded applications, hence the name "omni-IDE."
The omni-IDE capabilities provide the following benefits:
*Ready-to-use
*Practical utility
*Ease of deployment

Industrial conveying systems are used in many industries on production lines to convey many types of products such as cardboard boxes or plastic bottles. Typical conveyor systems consist of a moving chain or belt supported in a permanently mounted rigid frame with fixed guide rails to maintain product orientation as it flows down the conveyor.

Almost all the major diseases are somehow linked to metabolic alterations. The introduction of Hyperpolarized Metabolic Imaging has opened completely new possibilities to study non-invasively the biochemical changes in disease processes by improving the sensitivity of Magnetic Resonance by more than 20,000-fold (PNAS 2003).
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