Worldwide Aerospace & Aviation Innovation Awards

Few products operate within constraints as unforgiving as an aircraft. Weight, aerodynamics, structural integrity, propulsion, reliability, safety, efficiency, and human performance must all be considered simultaneously. Improvements in one area can create challenges somewhere else.

The DaVinci Awards® recognizes the ingenuity required to solve these interconnected problems within the aviation and aerospace industry.

Entrants may be tackling aviation's largest strategic challenges, including emissions, capacity, and new propulsion architectures. Others may have solved a specific operational problem whose knock-on effect across thousands of flights adds up.

Whether the innovation operates in the cockpit, cabin, hangar, control tower, terminal, or deep within the aircraft itself, judges will consider the improvement it creates and the technical achievement required to make it work reliably in the real world.

The DaVinci Awards recognizes outstanding feats of human ingenuity, and product innovation. Entries are welcomed from individuals, teams, startups, or established enterprises based anywhere in the world. Areas of interest include, but are certainly not limited to:

Aviation rarely permits improvement in isolation: changes to weight, power, aerodynamics, safety, maintenance, or operations can affect the performance of the wider system. Show judges how you navigated those constraints and where the difficult engineering or design thinking occurred. Whether your advance concerns an entire aircraft or a single component, explain what had to be solved, why established approaches were insufficient, and what makes your solution technically noteworthy.

Put the improvement into aviation terms. Does your product reduce weight, fuel consumption, emissions, maintenance requirements, turnaround time, delays, pilot workload, or operating cost? Does it increase range, capacity, reliability, safety, passenger comfort, or airspace efficiency? Establish an appropriate baseline and demonstrate the difference through testing, certification, operational results, simulation, or deployment. Marginal gains can be highly significant when multiplied across an aircraft's operational life.

Aerospace innovations must often coexist with aircraft and infrastructure expected to remain operational for decades. Explain how your solution fits into that environment and what wider adoption would require. Compatibility, certification, manufacturing capacity, maintenance, retrofit potential, and integration with existing fleets or aviation systems may all be relevant. Judges will also want to understand whether the underlying advance could support additional aircraft types, routes, operators, or future generations of aviation.

Winners may make full use of The DaVinci Awards® hallmark of excellence, linked to your level of accreditation, on all relevant materials.

All winners also receive a DaVinci Awards® trophy, and substantial press opportunities working in partnership with our editorial team. Find out more.