Vote for Your Favorite Entries

The 2026 contest is now closed for submissions, but you can still vote for your favorites. Voting is open through September 7. Here’s how.

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 16,000 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 in our 2026 contest.

Read About All the 2025 Winning Inventions

Special Report spotlights the eight amazing winners in 2025 as well as honorable mentions in each category, plus the top ten most popular entries as voted by our community.

Click here to read more

Thank 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

2010 Category Winners

CONSUMER PRODUCTS CATEGORY

BreezeRite Air Filtration Module
Rob Luchsinger, Pipe Creek, Texas
BreezeRite eliminates the dust build up on the top and forward edge of fan blades and allows the ease of cleaning by simply pulling out the filter housing and rinsing it off - or replacing it with new filters, instead of trying to vacuum, dust or wash down each fan blade.

MACHINERY & EQUIPMENT CATEGORY

Lift Pump
Eric Foy, Central Point, Oregon
The current invention comprises an axial flow impeller pump section located at the inlet end of the transfer hose, a power head at the flex-fitting located near the destination (tank or truck), and a flexible drive shaft running inside the transfer hose.

MEDICAL CATEGORY

IDEA™ Enhanced Pulse Oximetry
Rodrigo Teixeira, Alton J. Reich, Stephen F. Malin, Huntsville, Alabama
IDEA™ is an elegant confluence of recent advances in probabilistic inference, unsupervised machine learning and quantitative medicine.

SAFETY AND SECURITY CATEGORY

Digital Window Distributed Imaging Camera
Ellen Cargill, Peter Jones, Dennis Purcell, Boston MA
Scallop Imaging's seven mexapixel Digital Window D7-180 video surveillance camera is the first stand-alone computational imaging system, able to stream and record in full-color high resolution throughout its 180° field of view, without fisheye distortion.

SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY

Sustainable, Durable Bridges of the Future
Ibrahim Al-Khattat, Talacre, Wales United Kingdom
The LPSA (light prestressed segmented arch) engineering system reduces bridge building to assembling a kit of compact parts that can easily be manufactured and transported, resulting in considerable cost, energy, and capital investment savings

TRANSPORTATION CATEGORY

Regenerative Braking Bike Front Wheel
David Swain, Frank Maurer, Jason Moore, Albert Shih, Pipe Creek, Texas
The goal of the system is to ultimately make it a retrofit front-wheel for any bicycle using hydraulic pump motors that exist today and are over 94% efficient.