The MacRobert Award is regarded as the leading prize recognising UK innovation in

engineering Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to Problem solving#Engineering, solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve Systems engineering, s ...

by corporations. The winning team receives a gold medal and a cash sum of £50,000. The annual award process begins with an invitation to companies to submit entries, by the end of January. The judging panel for the awards, which includes several Fellows of the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senio ...

, then selects a shortlist of six to eight candidates. Following site visits, the judges produce a shortlist of three or four candidates for visits by the whole judging panel. The judges consider three key criteria when assessing entries: * Innovation * Commercial success * Benefit to society The guidance for submissions explains that "All three criteria may be interpreted broadly to reflect the very diverse nature of engineering and its role in every aspect of society". In 2019, the 50th anniversary year of the awards, Royal Mail issued a series of postage stamps marking "the marvels of British engineering", with a new set of 10 stamps that featured, along with other engineering achievements, three past winners of the MacRobert Award.

History

The award is named in honour of Rachel, Lady MacRobert (1884–1954). It was established in 1969 by the MacRobert Trust. In 1979 the Royal Academy of Engineering took on the administration, supported by the Worshipful Company of Engineers and industry sponsors. The criteria for judging entries have changed over the years. The original remit was to reward “an outstanding contribution” made “by way of innovation in the fields of engineering or the other physical technologies or in the application of the physical sciences, which has enhanced or will enhance the national prestige and prosperity of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. The first rule change was to include commercial success as a criterion. This was done to exclude entries that failed to have any lasting impact in the marketplace.

Winners

{{Columns-list, colwidth=30em, * 1969 -

Freeman Fox & Partners Hyder Consulting was a multi-national advisory and design consultancy with particular specialisation in the transport, property, utilities and environmental sectors. The firm employed approximately 4,200 people across the UK, Europe, Germany, Midd ...

- for the superstructure of the

Severn Bridge The Severn Bridge () is a Controlled-access highway, motorway suspension bridge that spans the River Severn between South Gloucestershire in England and Monmouthshire in South East Wales. It is the original Severn crossing, Severn road crossi ...

and

Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce (always hyphenated) may refer to: * Rolls-Royce Limited, a British manufacturer of cars and later aero engines, founded in 1906, now defunct Automobiles * Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, the current car manufacturing company incorporated in ...

- for the Pegasus Engine (Joint Winners) * 1970 -

British Petroleum BP p.l.c. (formerly The British Petroleum Company p.l.c. and BP Amoco p.l.c.; stylised in all lowercase) is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. It is one of the oil and gas " supermajors" and one of ...

- for new

surveying Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the land, terrestrial Plane (mathematics), two-dimensional or Three-dimensional space#In Euclidean geometry, three-dimensional positions of Point (geom ...

techniques * 1971 - The Gas Council - for innovative manufacturing processes * 1972 - EMI Limited - for advances in diagnosing Brain disease using

X-ray An X-ray (also known in many languages as Röntgen radiation) is a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than those of ultraviolet rays and longer than those of gamma rays. Roughly, X-rays have a wavelength ran ...

s * 1973 - Dunlop - for the Denovo tyre * 1974 - ICI Limited (Agricultural division) * 1975 -

Westland Helicopters Westland Helicopters was a British aircraft manufacturer. Originally Westland Aircraft, the company focused on helicopters after the Second World War. It was amalgamated with several other British firms in 1960 and 1961. In 2000, it merged ...

"For the semi-rigid rotor system and conformal gearing of the Lynx helicopter" and

British Railways Board The British Railways Board (BRB) was a State ownership, nationalised industry in the United Kingdom that operated from 1963 to 2001. Until 1997, it was responsible for most railway services in History of rail transport in Great Britain 1995 to d ...

"For developments in railway vehicle suspensions" (Joint Winners) * 1976 - No award. * 1977 - Royal Signals Research Establishment and Malvern Instruments "For the Malvern Correlator which measures the movement of particles or molecules" * 1978 - Pilkington Brothers Limited "For the Triplex Ten-Twenty laminated windscreen for cars and aircraft" * 1979 - Post Office Telecommunications * 1980 - Johnson Matthey Group * 1981 - Lucas CAV Limited * 1982 - Kaldair Limited * 1983 - Ruston Gas Turbines * 1984 - Netlon Limited * 1985 - The National Institute of Agricultural Engineering and

(Joint Winners) * 1986 - Oxford Instruments Group * 1987 -

Renishaw plc Renishaw plc is a British engineering company based in Wotton-under-Edge, England. The company's products include coordinate-measuring machines and machine tool products. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTS ...

* 1988 - Quantel Limited * 1989 -

British Gas British Gas (trading as Scottish Gas in Scotland) is an energy and home services provider in the United Kingdom. It is the trading name of British Gas Services Limited and British Gas New Heating Limited, both subsidiaries of Centrica. Serving ...

* 1990 - The

Science and Engineering Research Council The Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) and its predecessor the Science Research Council (SRC) were the UK agencies in charge of publicly funded scientific and engineering research activities, including astronomy, biotechnology and bi ...

* 1991 - Rover Group and

Defence Research Agency The Defence Research Agency (DRA) was an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) from April 1991 until April 1995. At the time, the DRA was Britain's largest science and technology organisation. In April 1995, the DRA was combined w ...

and GEC Sensors (Joint Winners) * 1992 - BP International * 1993 - ICI Klea * 1994 - Soil Machine Dynamics * 1995 -

British Gas plc British Gas (trading as Scottish Gas in Scotland) is an energy and home services provider in the United Kingdom. It is the trading name of British Gas Services Limited and British Gas New Heating Limited, both subsidiaries of Centrica. Serving ...

and Gill Electronic R&D * 1996 -

Rolls-Royce plc Rolls-Royce Holdings plc is a British multinational aerospace and defence company incorporated in February 2011. The company owns Rolls-Royce, a business established in 1904 which today designs, manufactures and distributes power systems for ...

- for the Trent aero-engine * 1997 - Whipp & Bourne (A division of FKI plc) * 1998 - Norton Healthcare Limited * 1999 -

Buro Happold Buro Happold Limited (previously ''BuroHappold Engineering'') is a British professional services firm that provides engineering consultancy, design, planning, project management, and consulting services for buildings, infrastructure, and the env ...

- for the

Millennium Dome The Millennium Dome was the original name of the large dome-shaped building on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East (London sub region), South East London, England, which housed a major exhibition celebrating the beginning of the third millen ...

design * 2000 -

Johnson Matthey Johnson Matthey plc is a British multinational speciality chemicals and sustainable technologies company headquartered in London, England. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. History Early year ...

* 2001 - Sensaura * 2002 - Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) − for light emitting polymers * 2003 - Randox Laboratories * 2004 -

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

− for the

WebSphere MQ IBM MQ is a family of message-oriented middleware products that IBM launched in December 1993. It was originally called MQSeries, and was renamed ''WebSphere MQ'' in 2002 to join the suite of WebSphere products. In April 2014, it was renamed ''IBM ...

* 2005 -

CSR plc CSR plc (formerly Cambridge Silicon Radio) was a multinational fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Its main products were connectivity, audio, imaging and location chips. CSR was listed on the London Sto ...

* 2006 - Optos plc * 2007 - Process Systems Enterprise * 2008 - Touch Bionics for the I-LIMB bionic hand * 2009 - Arup for the

Beijing National Aquatics Center The Water Cube (水立方), fully a.k.a. the National Aquatics Centre (), is a swimming center at the Olympic Green in Chaoyang, Beijing, Chaoyang, Beijing, China. The Water Cube was originally constructed to host the aquatics competitions at ...

* 2010 -

Inmarsat Inmarsat is a British communications satellite, satellite telecommunications company, offering global mobile services. It provides telephone and data services to users worldwide, via portable or mobile terminals which communicate with groun ...

for its Broadband Global Area Network (

BGAN The Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) is a global satellite network with telephony owned by Inmarsat using portable terminals. The terminals are normally used to connect a laptop computer to broadband Internet in remote locations, although as ...

) * 2011 -

Microsoft Research Cambridge Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

for the machine learning work on the human motion capture subsystem of

Kinect Kinect is a discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB color model, RGB cameras, and Thermographic camera, infrared projectors and detectors that map dep ...

* 2012 -

Jaguar Land Rover Jaguar Land Rover Automotive PLC is the holding company of Jaguar Land Rover, also known as JLR, and is a British multinational automobile manufacturer which produces luxury vehicles and SUVs and has its head office in Whitley, Coventry, Unite ...

for design and innovation building Range Rover Evoque * 2013 - RealVNC for the innovation of VNC Remote Access Software * 2014 - Cobalt Light Systems for the innovation of Insight100 airport security liquid scanner * 2015 - Artemis Intelligent Power for the innovation of Digital Displacement hydraulic transmission.{{cite web, title='Massive leap' wins engineering award, url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-33552037, publisher=BBC, accessdate=17 July 2015 The judging panel was chaired by Dame Sue Ion. * 2016 - Blatchford for the world's most 'intelligent' prosthetic limb. The judging panel was chaired by Dame Sue Ion. * 2017 -

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi ( ) is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in collaboration with Broadcom Inc., Broadcom. To commercialize the product and support its growing demand, the ...

"for its inexpensive credit card-sized microcomputers, which are redefining how people engage with computing, inspiring students to learn coding and computer science and providing innovative control solutions for industry."{{cite web , url=http://www.raeng.org.uk/grants-and-prizes/prizes-and-medals/awards/the-macrobert-award , title=MacRobert award , publisher=Royal Academy of Engineering , accessdate=2 July 2017 * 2018 - Owlstone Medical "for its ReCIVA Breath Sampler, the first device capable of capturing breath samples for analysis in a robust and reproducible way" *2019 -

Bombardier Aerospace Bombardier Aviation, a division of Bombardier Inc., is headquartered in Dorval, Quebec, Canada. The company currently produces the Global and Challenger series of business jets. At its peak, Bombardier operated manufacturing plants in 27 c ...

for its resin-infused advanced composite wing that minimises an aircraft’s environmental impact by reducing weight and fuel consumption in flight, and waste during manufacture. *2020 - JCB "for developing and manufacturing the world’s first volume-produced fully electric digger (19C-1E), with zero exhaust emissions, improved productivity, outstanding noise and vibration characteristics and emission-free at point of use for use inside buildings."{{cite web , title=The winner of the 2020 MacRobert Award: JCB , url=https://www.raeng.org.uk/grants-prizes/prizes/prizes-and-medals/awards/the-macrobert-award-engineering-innovation , accessdate=23 July 2020 *2021 - DnaNudge "for its pioneering genetic testing technology that enables consumers to shop more healthily – nudged by their DNA plus lifestyle" *2022 - Quanta Dialysis Technologies "for creating a compact and portable dialysis machine, allowing more flexible and accessible care for patients with renal failure" *2023 - Ceres Power "for its pioneering clean energy technology, including fuel cells for power generation and electrolysers for green hydrogen"

References

{{reflist, 30em

External links

The MacRobert Award - Royal Academy of Engineering

MacRobert Winners 1969-2015 - Royal Academy of Engineering

MacRobert Award 2005 winner and finalists, ''Ingenia'' Magazine
June 2005
MacRobert Award 2006 winner and finalists, ''Ingenia'' Magazine
June 2006
MacRobert Award 2007 winner and finalists, ''Ingenia'' Magazine
June 2007
MacRobert Award 2008 winner and finalists, ''Ingenia'' Magazine
June 2008 British science and technology awards Awards of the Royal Academy of Engineering Awards established in 1969

History

Winners

See also

References

External links