It’s all about teamwork, and there are three awards up for grabs to celebrate the art of collaboration in the engineering workplace.
Our 2026 winners
Sustainability and Climate Change
Okapiland & Institut for Regenerative Development
Zero Black: Engineering a circular future from waste to building, water and life
Okapiland and the Institut for Regenerative Development collaborated by combining field engineering with policy and design expertise, delivering training to 365 local community trainers. Individuals in the team anchored mineral resources and material innovation, embedded architecture and policy, delivered structural design, and extended material science, uniting every discipline toward one shared goal.
Shared conviction, inclusive leadership, and knowledge transfer over aid dependency were key factors, uniting communities as collaborators. Limited policy support, market resistance and conflict affected regions posed obstacles, overcome through the Institut's governance expertise repositioning Okapiland's work within trusted frameworks.
Digital Futures
Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, North China Electric Power University, Huakong AI Plus Company Limited
Multimodal AI Monitoring for safer renewable energy infrastructure
Teamwork was built on shared purpose and open communication, complimentary expertise, inclusive ownership and mutual trust, shared codebases and evaluation, field feedback, and agentic engineering that accelerated implementation across the team. These practices turned field challenges into collective improvements while preserving expert review.
Our members work in multiple locations and collaborate through routine online meetings and deployment debriefs. The team combines expertise in AI, signal processing, power engineering, hardware, software and field implementation. We maintain shared, reusable codebases to reduce duplicated effort, use cutting-edge agentic engineering and bring operator feedback into research.
Healthy lives
The Psychomotricity Centre, The African Oasis, UK Congolese Engineers Network Association
Food 4 ALL: Engineering health, nutrition and community wellbeing from the ground up
The Psychomotricity Centre, UK CENA, African Oasis CIC, and Omnigro USA collaborated as one interdisciplinary team spanning engineering, medicine, agriculture, and education. Communication ran through shared planning, data sharing, and joint site visits, proving that cross organisation, cross continent teamwork delivers lasting community impact.
The Psychomotricity Centre brought clinical expertise, ensuring therapeutic growing programmes served autistic participants and those managing mental health challenges. Omnigro USA contributed precision agricultural technology, working directly with UK engineers on smart container deployment. In achieving teamwork there was a shared purpose between the teams and clear role distribution by expertise, open cross discipline communication, and mutual respect between engineers, clinicians, and community partners.
Who is it for?
Teams of engineers of all types and sizes including multi and cross-discipline. They can be based anywhere in the world and be from any part of the industry.
They can be formed of any number of individuals and can include junior team members e.g., apprentices and early career technicians.
What are the awards for?
Sustainability and climate change – teams working to secure a zero-carbon future.
Digital Futures – teams collaborating on projects in the field of promoting professional ethics and trust.
Healthy lives – teams innovating assisted living, robotics.
What's on offer?
A trophy
Winning teams will be presented with a trophy to proudly showcase their teamwork success.
An awards ceremony
You will be invited to attend the ceremony to celebrate teamwork winners and sharing your story with the STEM community.
Network and develop your team’s careers
At the ceremony, you will have the opportunity to network with other inspirational engineers.
Tell your team story
We want to share the story of your team’s collaboration, so you will benefit from IET-led PR and communications activities.
- What else do I need to know?
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- These awards are open for third-party nomination or self-application; the more first-hand information is provided, the better. Teams are encouraged to nominate themselves
- A lead applicant or nominator will be asked to complete the online form (not every member of a team)
- Whether the work delivered is in the public or private sector, all applications will be considered if applicants can prove that teamwork has enabled you to deliver impactful engineering solutions
- Inspirational and impactful work and significant advancements made to improve the quality of life from the unsung heroes in the industry is especially welcome.
- What is the criteria?
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These awards are for teams of engineers (including apprentices, and technicians) and are not intended for a specific technology or service.
Awards will not be accepted regarding specific products and services. Engineers in Society Awards are all about celebrating teamwork.