Each year, the James Dyson Award looks for young engineers, designers and dreamers currently enrolled—or recently graduated (within four years)—from an engineering or design programme at a participating university, who can solve the world’s most persistent problems with elegance and purpose.

The brief is deceptively simple: Design something that works. Entries can be individual or in teams, and submissions range across categories including medical, environment, sustainability, AI, industrial design, and more.

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In 2025, that challenge yielded breathtaking ingenuity. From water bodies choking on industrial pollutants to millions of people navigating daily life with Parkinson’s disease, this year’s winners stepped up with practical, human-centred solutions grounded in science and empathy.

Two global winners were announced on Wednesday— OnCue, a medical innovation from the Netherlands, an adaptive keyboard that helps people with Parkinson’s type confidently using cues and haptics, developed by and WaterSense, an autonomous river-monitoring system from Poland that predicts contamination 72 hours in advance.

Over the years, the award has built a reputation for spotlighting genuinely useful inventions: devices that are light on jargon and heavy on functionality. Past winners have gone on to commercialise their designs, patent their work and even influence policymaking.

This year’s global champions continue that legacy—rooted in creativity, but guided by clarity.

Both innovators, Alessandra Galli and Filip Budny, will receive £30,000 (around Rs 35 lakh) in prize money to propel their inventions into real-world de