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 moreThank 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
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Contest
Modern high tech steam engine makes it possible to realize small scale decentralized generation exploiting local renewable energi resources. Besides to produce electricity and heat steam engines unfold small-scale local production of synthetic fuel as hydrogen, ammonia and methanol.
Metals are indispensable to the modern economy and remain natural choices for structural applications due to their toughness, corrosion resistance, thermal and electrical conductivity, and recyclability. Among structural metals, aluminum is particularly important because of its high specific strength and widespread adoption across transportation, construction, electrical, electronic, aerospace, and marine sectors.
There is a substantial spectrum of economic activities that depend on reacting to events. Event-reaction systems require event descriptions to be interpretable and reliable as to the source and integrity of their contents. Enterprises guarantee all those conditions by insuring event data sources, destinations, and data flows between them all occur within a common secure (enterprise-wide) realm.
SwallowSafe AI shifts dysphagia support from static, preset drinking cups into patient-responsive, closed-loop fluid pacing by physically linking throat-motion feedback to adaptive fluid delivery.
Many rehabilitative swallowing-risk patients can drink orally, but ordinary fixed-volume aids do not respond when fatigue, delayed swallow recovery, or poor coordination appears during a meal.
This innovation addresses a key limitation in Opposed Piston Internal Combustion Engines (OP-ICE) by introducing a compact architecture where two pistons operate in a shared cylinder with facing heads. The design offers substantial improvements in size, performance, and volumetric self-sufficiency compared to existing OP engines.
Compact size:
This architecture reduces the engine block width by 30%,
This innovation introduces a Hybrid Transmission System (the System) that goes beyond conventional mild hybrid configurations. While typical setups manage only torque from the internal combustion engine (ICE) and electric machine (EM), this System enables precise control of both torque and RPM, placing the hybrid set consistently near its maximum efficiency range and avoiding high-emission operating zones.
Two innovations power AI controlled infrastructure. Of course AI runs the house. Metering and billing cycles for; AC power, water use, gas, trash, sewer and Wi-Fi. AI smart meter performs all functions presently distributed among various utilities. Combined billing functions use cloud based clearing house. Consumer pays one bill, AI distributes payment to providers.
Problems with locating pipes in buildings and the ground, mostly made of plastic, causing problems and damage during renovations, repairs and reconstructions.
Pipes hidden under plaster, plasterboards, or in the ground create problems and the possibility of damage because even technical documentation often does not reflect their actual location.
This applies to water, sewage and gas pipes.
To pass on a code, e.g. a promotional code, you need to show the reader or service the home screen, which may contain personal information – used applications, photos, which violates our privacy.
The solution is an additional, high-contrast rear display for QR and EAN codes, which speeds up code reading. Furthermore,
Energy shortage is one of the most critical sustainability challenges that we face today. The emerging solutions are not without their own problems. For example, hydrogen or solar cells have their respective negative environmental footprints. Moreover, food production on earth has never really evolved to replace of supplement traditional agriculture. On the other hand,
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