What are you looking for when judging innovation award entries?

The most impressive and attractive innovations are ones that address some of the world’s biggest challenges. We have seen entries that could have a significant and direct impact on health, sustainable development, energy, and climate change. Increasingly, engineers want to work on problems that can make a difference and it is hugely rewarding and motivating to see the impact of their work. The awards can help those engineers to see that their work is recognised and get feedback that others also see the potential for global impact. One of those innovations was Oxford PV, which has been recognised for scaling up production of Perovskite PV panels to commercial levels, which could have a direct impact on the future of renewable energy.

Some entries have been remarkable by combining several ideas from disparate areas to produce an innovation. A good example is BT, last year’s winner of the Intelligent...