Comprising teams of two to five people, engineering students can take part by presenting a relevant, innovative project in English on the contest’s website, valeoinnovationchallenge.valeo.com. The aim is to stimulate the students’ creativity, enabling them to form multidisciplinary teams. In this way, engineering students can join forces with students in the social sciences or any other scientific discipline that they think could be useful for their innovation project.

The 20 shortlisted teams will then be asked to create a model in the format of their choice (physical mock-up, application or other). Each team will be given €5,000 to put their idea into practice and build a functioning demonstrator.

The finalists will present their projects to the Challenge jury of Valeo experts and outside partners, chaired by Valeo CEO Jacques Aschenbroich, at the 2015 Frankfurt Auto Show. The winning team will take home a €100,000 prize.

The Valeo Innovation Challenge is part of Valeo’s innovation strategy, supported by the company’s annual Research and Development budget of over €1 billion. Innovation drives faster growth at Valeo, a technological partner for all automakers worldwide.

With close to 800 patents filed in 2013, innovation underpins the work of Valeo’s 10,000 researchers, who are striving each day to invent the automobiles of tomorrow in order to make innovation widely accessible.