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.
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“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/2010
2010
Problem:
Riding a bicycle with motorized traffic presents a safety issue. Cyclists are often hard to see and their intentions are not easily interpreted by vehicle drivers. Cycling at night is an additional challenge, as most cyclists are not prepared with the proper equipment for visibility.
As companies around the world have grappled with how best to implement electric cars and electric transmissions, they have fallen prey to the trap of old design paradigms. They insist on placing a small electric motor under the hood, just like a gas motor, with batteries under the floor boards. It’s time to break from this mold,
Steganography, derived from Greek, roughly translated as “cover writing.” It is a “hide and seek” system that embeds hidden information in unremarkable cover media so as not to arouse an eavesdropper’s suspicion except the intended recipient. Embedding a message into an image requires two files. The first is the innocent-looking image that will hold the hidden information,
Description:
The Tooth-Mover is not intended to replace braces. It is only intended to give slight adjustments to the visible teeth. It is built into a modified silicone mouth guard. When worn, the user chews on the mouthguard. This motion pivots a pair of steel arcs that move a pushrod to apply gentle pressure on the forward teeth.
Instrument A-B Connection Box
Current implementations of instrument A-B switching devices use either an push-on/push-off maintained connection push-button foot switch, or various unnecessarily complex electronic means to do a simple switching function.
Problems:
These devices have some disadvantages.
(e.g., No indication of, or difficult to view, switch status;
Utilization of front amber turn signal lamps, employed as collision and pedestrian avoidance safety lighting, for every car, truck, motorcycle, moped, and semi-tractor trailer on the planet. This is accomplished using ultra low cost design from U.S. Patent #7,482,756. This design and system improves daytime public safety and security, plus can improve transportation safety for businesses,
Every year over 1.2 million people die in the world due to traffic related accidents. The goal of the Spira Personal Mass Transit (PMT) system is to save lives by taking vehicles off the road and into the air. The system is comprised of four major components: a rail, mules, support structure, and Spira vehicles.
The world population every year continues to grow at an alarming rate and we are feeling the effects of it increasing more and more every day. More people means more housing, more cars, more energy, and more pollution. More energy and pollution are two that go together. The bioreactor air scrubber is here to counter act that.
High-Flow Lift Pump
In fighting wildfires, and in many other applications, there is a need to lift water a few feet, say from a creek or river, to fill a header tank or mobile water tender. Particularly in firefighting, turnaround time is what measures success at the end of the day.
Virtually everyone has had the experience of placing a pot of water onto the heating element of a kitchen range, turning the selector to "Max" and then walking to the other room while making a mental note to return "in a few minutes" to remove the boiling pot from the element. Everyone knows what usually happens next....
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