Deadline: 6 October 2024
Wege Prize, organized by Kendall College of Art and Design’s Wege Center for Sustainable Design with support from the Wege Foundation, is an annual competition that ignites game-changing solutions for the future by inspiring college/university students around the world to collaborate across institutional, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries to redesign the way economies work.
The Challenge
- The challenge for Wege Prize participants is to:
- Build a strong and diverse transdisciplinary team of five students
- Identify a complex, “wicked” problem to address
- Develop a compelling solution that is built on the three
- core principles of the circular economy
- Wege Prize is looking for solutions that are:
- Circular – helping accelerate the transition to a circular economy and a shift towards renewables. Not just recycling/upcycling, but designing out waste entirely
- Innovative – providing unique value and exploring untapped potential
- Viable – demonstrating the potential for marketability, profitability, and financial sustainability Scaleable – effectively contribute to expanding the circular economy at a global level
- Systemic – accounting for the way in which parts of a system both influence each other and work as a whole
- Not solely reliant on behavioral change – if behavioral change is needed for your solution to work, how will you help drive it?
- Human centered – includes demonstrated research and consideration of the user and any affected communities in all aspects of the design
Prize Information
- Participants contend for $65,000 (USD) in total cash prizes, all while learning—and helping to show the world—what the future of problem solving looks like.
- Over the course of nine months, from the opening of the application period through the final presentation and awards event, teams will compete to advance through up to four distinct phases, growing their ideas from an informal proposal into a robust and feasible solution informed by research, market analysis, and real-world prototyping and testing.
- Winning teams will split the following awards evenly between their five members:
- First Place: $30,000 (USD)
- Second Place: $20,000 (USD)
- Third Place: $10,000 (USD)
- Finalist Awards (2): $2,500 (USD)
Eligibility Criteria
- To be eligible to participate in wege prize, teams must:
- Have exactly five members
- Represent at least three (3) different academic disciplines
- Represent at least two (2) different institutions of higher education, such as colleges, universities, or separate colleges/schools within a larger university. (For instance, a team member from Example University’s School of Engineering and a team member from Example University’s School of Earth Sciences would be considered as representing two different institutions.)
- To be eligible to join a team, individuals must:
- Attend a college, university, or equivalent institution of higher education anywhere in the world
- Be a student enrolled in a full-time (or equivalent) undergraduate, graduate, or post-graduate program, for the duration of the competition
- Teams can be composed of a mix of undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students if they so choose.
For more information, visit Kendall College of Art and Design.
