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/2011
2011
The visual impact of one of today's small advertising blimps is awesome. The grandeur of a dirigible of yesteryear is legendary. But even more impressive is the raw lifting power of a gigantic lighter-than-air craft
The lifting power of a dirigible increases as the cube of its size.
We're attempting to fill the need to illuminate containers dropped onto flatbeds being driven on highways throughout the world without any lights. Presently all trailers have lights on their top perimeters making them visible, but no such lighting exists on containers. This invention addresses that and may be useful in other areas as well.
We introduce a “Power Generation Station” to supply energy for rechargeable batteries and products including mobile phones, IPADs, IPODs, laptops, window fans, lighting, signs, EGRESS lighting, portable refrigerators, seasonal decorations, and simultaneously charge batteries. Multiple units networked together offer increased capacity to re-distribute power where needed most.
Future cars require significant improvements in fuel consumption, emissions and safety. So far, they have been obtained through a more than proportional increase in complexity and cost. The new hydrostatic powertrain shows drastic improvements in all three areas and for reduced costs.
Conventional cars use around 14% of the energy for driving.
I designed this flexible solar film powered highway safety cone add-on with form, fit, and function in mind. In order to be useful, it must conform to present use of safety cones. They're thrown out of trucks, stacked on top of each other on a rod support,
Using stainless steel thread recently made available to weave a 1/2" wide perimeter sensor around a baby's pull-over that is able to touch skin, we can provide an actual machine-washable flexible lighted animated display embedded in the garment that appears as a heart and matches the pulse rate of the baby wearing it in a crib.
With a machine I invented to high-speed implant plastic fiber optic cables into fabric, I created a flexible, machine-washable, lighted display in black fabric to be sewn into a motorcycle jacket defining arrows and a flame-frame (designed to surround an embroidered brand name) that normally appears as a moving animated burning flame.
I invented a machine (#1 in Picture) that evolved into three different CNC machine configurations designed to permanently implant plastic optical fibers into any flexible materials including fabrics for apparel, vinyls, light plastics, coroplast, cardboard, gatorboard, etc. Each fiber is then assigned and placed into a comb position that will be attached to an LED (Monochromatic or RGB).
Fire Suppression Screen
Fires of many different types and sizes can be suppressed mechanically by use of a properly configured metal mesh screen.
A characteristic of a fine metal mesh screen is that flame will not penetrate the plane of the mesh screen; however water can be readily sprayed through a screen.
The PDT is a Hybrid of Steam, Gas Jet turbine, and Reciprocating technologies. The name Positive Displacement Turbine suggests a contradiction in terms; however, we need to make use of a paradigm shift in thinking of what constitutes a turbine. The PDT generates a cyclonic subroutine of rotating gasses perpendicular to the central shaft. An osculating-crescent-piston,
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