Product Design Engineering Contest

Hi all, I am posting on behalf of my employer, Teknek. Teknek is the world leader in contact cleaning. They are offering a unique and exciting opportunity to design the new Dust Cleaning Roller (DCR).

The competition is free to enter and is open to everyone. There is £2,000 to be won.

Click here to find out more: Teknek · Product Design Competition - DCR

Wow. $2K to design and engineer your next product and you relinquish all IP? Absolutely insulting to any design professional.

+1 Lowe9

That’s 2k IF you win… but bonus, you get to hand over the IP anyway!

Hello. Your suggestions are most welcome.

Perhaps there is some misunderstanding about who we are trying to attract and the value of what we are trying to develop.

We have very successfully engaged with a wide variety of Universities throughout the world including the likes of GSA. Not only have we held many competitions, but also committed considerable funds to the sponsorship of courses, equipment and the like. This then is an extension of that long-established program.

Our company is quite unique, we design and make in the UK but export 98% of all production. A large part of our attractiveness is the design of our core technology, with the form somewhat secondary.

This program is really aimed at inspiring product designers, and we have chosen a product that’s about material selection and styling. We have our own internal product design team but wanted to bring fresh perspective and help showcase British design.

We are not expecting much by way of IP. However, we expect during the design process we may impart industry knowledge and the like and therefore feel it’s important to ensure that this is not exploited to our disadvantage.

Whilst we understand that some may misinterpret this program as a method of gathering multiple designs, it’s not. The market for this product is specialised, relatively small, and requires other key parts such as cleaning rollers to be viable. The hand cleaning sector is not one of our core markets given its size and value. However, we wanted to see if a new approach may create good conversations as opposed to substantial sales.