This autumn, Valeo will kick off its second annual global innovation contest, the Valeo Innovation Challenge. Engineering students from around the world will compete to win the EUR 100,000 grand prize.
With this challenge, Valeo is offering young engineers worldwide the opportunity to create the equipment that will make cars more intelligent and intuitive by 2030. Valeo will announce the terms and conditions of this year’s contest at the 2014 Paris Motorshow.
Comprising teams of two to five people, engineering students can take part by presenting a relevant, innovative project in English on the contest’s website, valeoinnovationchallenge.valeo.com. The aim is to stimulate the students’ creativity, enabling them to form multi-disciplinary teams. In this way, engineering students can join forces with students in the social sciences or any other scientific discipline that they think could be useful for their innovation project.
The 20 shortlisted teams will then be asked to create a model in the format of their choice (physical mock-up, application or other). Each team will be given EUR 5,000 to put their idea into practice and build a functioning demonstrator.
The finalists will present their projects to the Challenge jury of Valeo experts and outside partners, chaired by Valeo CEO Jacques Aschenbroich, at the 2015 Frankfurt Auto Show. The winning team will take home a EUR 100,000 prize.
The Valeo Innovation Challenge is part of the company’s innovation strategy, supported by its annual R&D budget of over EUR 1 billion. Innovation drives faster growth at Valeo, a technological partner for all automakers worldwide.
With close to 800 patents filed in 2013, innovation underpins the work of Valeo’s 10,000 researchers who are striving each day to invent the automobiles of tomorrow in order to make innovation widely accessible.
In 2013, for the second consecutive year, Valeo was featured in Thomson Reuters’ Top 100 Global Innovators ranking, reflecting the group’s commitment to innovation. The group plans to hire some 1,000 engineers and technicians a year over the next three years, including 400 in France.