MacRobert Award

Judging Timetable

Entries will be accepted from early October with a closing date of the last day of January, the following year. All submissions received are acknowledged by letter and allocated a reference number.

The Short Listing Stage

Following the closing date for submissions, the Judging Panel reviews all the entries and selects a short-list of eight to ten candidates. Applicants will be notified of the result of this process in mid-March. The Panel does not normally comment on submissions that are not short-listed. However, if the primary reason for not selecting a submission is that it is too early to judge the commercial success of the project, applicants will be informed of this and invited to resubmit the project in a subsequent year. The results of the short-listing process, successful or otherwise, remain confidential.

For those submissions that are short-listed, the Panel may request additional information on particular aspects of the project. They may request that this information be provided in writing or at the subsequent site visit.

Two members of the judging panel will visit each of the short-listed organisations. Where possible, one member will be chosen for their expertise in the field, the other will often be an expert in an unrelated field.

Site visits to the short-listed applicants will take place between Tuesday 9 April to Thursday 18 April 2013. The person named as the organisation’s contact should be available to help organise the visit and should ensure that the individual nominees will be available for the visit.

More details of the objectives and requirements of the site visit will be provided to the short-listed organisations.

“The site visit turned out to have many additional benefits. In particular, it has helped us improve our marketing material because we had to think in a particular way how to present our company, what it does and what the benefits are.” Professor Nilay Shah, Director, Process Systems Enterprise Limited, MacRobert Award Winner 2007

The Final stage

Following the site visit, the case for each short-listed entry will be made to the full panel by the two judges who visited that organisation. As a result of this process, up to four finalists are then chosen. The short-listed companies should hear the results of this process during the second half of April. The Panel does not normally comment on submissions that are not chosen as finalists. Again, however, if the panel felt that a particular submission would have been considerably strengthened by further commercial success, the applicant will be informed of this and invited to resubmit the project in a subsequent year.

The whole Judging Panel then visits all the finalists in turn. Again, the person named as the organisation’s contact should be available to help organise the visit and should ensure that the individual nominees and the head of the organisation will be available for the visit. These visits will take place between Tuesday 21 May to Wednesday 29 May 2013. When all the finalists have been visited, the judges meet to decide the winner.

The winner of the MacRobert Award is announced at The Royal Academy of Engineering Annual Awards Dinner normally held at the beginning of June in a prestigious London location. Finalist teams will be invited to attend and to mount a display of their project during the pre-dinner reception.

Finalists will be invited to participate in a number of other publicity related activities prior to the announcement of the winner. Publicity is sought in the trade press and other media.

An article about each finalist will appear in Ingenia, the Academy’s quarterly magazine. Ingenia is received by over 8000 leaders and opinion formers both within and outside the engineering profession.

The winner of the Award will also be invited to exhibit their projects at the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Forum for Engineering.

 

 

Updated October 2012

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