The James Dyson Award is the international design and engineering competition for students promoted by the James Dyson Foundation. It opened submissions, challenging inventors from around the world to come up with novel projects that address a pressing real-world problem.
James Dyson 2024: the competition for the ideas of young inventors
Open to all engineering and design students and recent graduates. The award seeks ambitious projects that address a global problem, from cancer diagnosis to natural disasters. With global recognition offered to one international winner and one sustainability winner, past winners include an off-road trailer ambulance to rescue the wounded from conflict zones. And again: a paint made of recycled glass that significantly reduces the need for air conditioning and a device to control bleeding from cut wounds.
Established in 2005, the competition has supported over 400 young inventors with prize money of over £1 million. More than two-thirds of previous global winners have pursued commercialization of their ideas.
The prize
The international winner and the global sustainability winner will win £30,000 to support their next steps. While £5,000 will be offered to each national winner across the 30 markets where the prize takes place.
James Dyson 2024, success stories
Previous winners of the award have achieved great success thanks to the global media exposure and injection of funds that the award offers. Previous international winner Yusuf Muhammad presented his Automist invention in 2009.
It is a device that tackles domestic fires with an ingenious water atomization mechanism that consumes 10 times less than a traditional system. Today, Yusuf runs a successful company that has installed over 13,000 systems and is currently obtaining international certification for a possible launch in the United States.
Previous winners
Other previous winners around the world include:
- The Golden Capsule (South Korea). A hands-free intravenous (IV) device designed for disaster areas, which can be tethered to the patient and is not dependent on gravity.
- HOPES (Singapore). A wearable device for painless, low-cost glaucoma testing that patients can take at home.
- PlasticScanner (Netherlands). An open-source scanning device that helps fight plastic waste by detecting the type of plastic in an item.
- BlueBox (Spain). An at-home cancer screening solution designed to encourage more women to get tested for breast cancer.
- mOm incubators (UK). A low-cost portable and foldable incubator, which has been successfully used to save the lives of children in Ukraine.
The top national winners and runners-up will be shortlisted into the global Top 20 by a panel of expert Dyson engineers from different disciplines and finally Sir James Dyson himself will choose the global winners.
National winners will be announced on September 11, the global top 20 on October 16, and global winners on November 13.
