It’s back! The second IET Young Professionals Global Challenge was launched in November 2016 at the Innovation Awards ceremony.
The competition, held in association with RedR, encourages young professionals and students to test their technical know-how by devising a solution to a real world engineering problem. It enables young engineers to develop their technical, problem-solving and presentation skills and, as we have seen from the first competition, it can lead to some incredible opportunities within industry.In the first Global Challenge, 30 innovative ideas were submitted from all over the world for a portable, economical laptop cooling system for humanitarian aid workers to use in the field.
One solution, called hipsterIce, was the clear winner due to its sheer simplicity, low levels of maintenance and use of eco-friendly materials. We’ve been tracking the successes of its innovators, Joshua de Gromoboy, Siddharth Gupta and Gwilym Rowbottom, a team of undergraduates at Pembroke College, Cambridge University.
The team has since gone on to build and test a prototype of hipsterIce, set up its own company, Pembroke Innovations Ltd, and send a prototype to Darfur in Sudan with RedR for testing. Joshua explained a little more about the Global Challenge journey:
“Participating in the IET Young Professionals Global Challenge was an incredibly rewarding experience, as we were given the chance to apply our engineering knowledge to a real world problem. Armed with feedback and support from the judges, we are now aiming to further develop and commercialise our solution. We are grateful to the IET for this fantastic opportunity. This year, we also entered hipsterIce into the James Dyson Award, a competition that showcases innovative engineering developments around the world, and we were incredibly pleased to be awarded National Runners Up by the judging panel. In addition to our continued work on hipsterIce, we are looking out for other competitions to enter and we are very excited to see how this year’s Global Challenge plays out!”
You can find out more about this competition on the IET Global Challenge website.
*This blogpost was originally an article in Member News