Apr 01, 2021
The Engineer’s annual Collaborate To Innovate Awards competition has been reinvented as a week-long content-heavy, online celebration of some of the UK’s most inspiring examples of engineering innovation.
Keen observers of the manufacturing and engineering sectors – markets which are served by a number of key MAB publications – will be aware of the ways in which digital technologies are helping to usher in the so-called fourth industrial revolution.
This transformation, which has seen engineering organisations embrace technologies ranging from augmented reality headsets and AI to collaborative robots and 3D printers, has been underway for a number of years now, but the events and pressures of the past 12 months have helped to accelerate the process.
The impact of COVID-19 on the sector, and the way in which the pandemic has catalysed the adoption of new technologies has been a key area of coverage for The Engineer, the UK longest-running engineering publication. But as well as reporting from the frontline of the digital revolution, the magazine has also taken its own digital medicine and, over the course of the past year, launched a number of initiatives that tap into the sector’s growing appetite for digital products.
One of the most notable initiatives in this regard is the Engineer’s annual Collaborate To Innovate Awards competition which, in the teeth of the pandemic, was reinvented as a week-long content-heavy, online celebration of some of the UK’s most inspiring examples of engineering innovation.
According to The Engineer’s editor and publisher Jon Excell, feedback from judges, sponsors, shortlisted finalists and The Engineer’s audience was overwhelmingly positive, “Collaborate to Innovate week was a tremendous success,“ he said. “Exceptionally high levels of web traffic, social media activity and audience engagement throughout the week helped to bring the initiative to a far greater audience than is possible with a traditional face-to-face awards party. And whilst we’re looking forward to including a physical element in the future, the lessons that we have learned during lockdown, and the way in which has enabled us to supercharge the competition, will feed directly into its next iteration.”