Unsolved mechanical engineering challenges can be blocking. Coming down the development flow, at a certain point it is hard to turn your head freely around to look for a completely unbiased new solution. But the crowd can! Let us help you.

Our crowd users have proven to be very creative when it comes to solve the impossible. We were able to gain experience in several challenges where even Universities claimed there is no solution for the mechanical design problem.

At the start, we agreed to run the project in several steps to separate the development flow and find appropriate challenge steps that can be evaluated: Ideas /Concept/ Prototypes/Production.

Then we defined the ideation challenge with clear requirements on what mechanical solutions will be accepted for the award. In only 2 months, we got 40 ideas of which we found 19 were fulfilling these requirements. Now we had to decide which one will be turned into executable concepts including CAD drawings for the next phase.

This second phase was done in a special private mode so only the project owner and the contributors were allowed to see the solutions. The final concept decision was of course also driven by feasibility and cost to implement. Finally, a working prototype of the winning solution has been built and is ready for production. In this case it was even built by one of the solution providers from the crowd.

If you are facing a mechanical design problem – let the crowd help you. Have a look at our shop offer for mechanical design challenges

The second one is called high rack ware house basket challenge. It is a complex mechanical engineering challenge as a new basket for a high rack warehouse needed to be designed.

Starting point is a requested workflow from the production workers which cannot be fulfilled with the current basket. But the production process as such had been running well with the existing solution for many, many years. So here it is an additional challenge to run a winning system for most of the production needs – but not all.

It was quite surprising to see that many of the submitted solutions which initially seemed off topic, actually opened up new perspectives, which led to solutions that showed how the workers could be empowered to get the job done without changes to the basket. Additionally interesting redesign solutions of the existing baskets were submitted as well as completely new designs.

It just showed how often challenges are often defined based on the problem we currently see. But if someone else looks at the same thing many different solutions and ways to overcome these challenges show up.

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…. And if you start your own challenge do not forget to invite your own employees and customers, they love to work on challenges and maybe even win one of the awards. Give them the chance to prove themselves!