Apply for the Wege Prize 2025 (up to $65,000)

Applications for the Wege Prize 2025 are now open. 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.

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. Each step of the way, they will be guided by direct feedback from a panel of expert judges who will help them strengthen their ideas, push the limits of possibility, and support bringing their plans into fruition.

The Challenge of Wege Prize

The challenge for participants is to:

• Build a strong and diverse transdisciplinary team of five
• Identify a complex, “wicked” problem to address
• Develop a compelling solution to the problem that is built on the three core principles of the circular economy: Eliminate waste and pollution; keep products and materials in use; and regenerate our natural systems.

The 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

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Prize of Wege Prize

• Participants contend for $65,000 USD in total cash prizes, all while helping to show the world what the future of problem solving looks like.

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Eligibility

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 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.

Application

Submit just one application per team. The application will ask for all of your team members’ details, so be sure to enter their information correctly.

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