Platform for Change
The German Innovation Awards Make Impact Visible
The German Innovation Awards are the cross-industry innovation awards of the German Design Council. Since 2017, they have recognised products, concepts and applications that enable genuine progress – from green tech to digital healthcare, from smart everyday solutions through to complex high-tech systems.
What matters is not how loudly an idea is communicated, but its ability to make a difference in business and society. The German Innovation Awards provide guidance in a complex innovation landscape and make solutions visible that go beyond technical novelty to create real impact – for people, markets and society.
At their heart are not only the innovations themselves, but also the people who make them possible. From start-ups and medium-sized enterprises to globally active corporations: each year, the German Innovation Awards receive around 600 submissions from more than 30 countries.
The awards ceremony brings the award-winning projects and the people behind them on stage and creates space for knowledge exchange and networking. In this way, the German Innovation Awards bring together people who drive innovation and actively shape the future.
The German Innovation Awards understand innovation as a novel solution that is effective, relevant and implemented in practice. It may take the form of a technology, a product, a service, a process, a business model or an integrated concept – wherever it creates tangible added value for users, markets or society.
Innovation does not have to change everything: even the targeted improvement of a single component, product aspect or detail can make a decisive difference. On both a large and small scale, this is how change emerges that generates real impact.
The connection between knowledge and application also shapes the wider context of the awards: with German Innovation Spotlight 2026, the German Design Council brings research and business practice together.
The study, developed jointly with the Fraunhofer Group for Innovation Research, examines how innovative companies in Germany are, where structural strengths lie and which conditions are needed to turn the will to innovate into concrete implementation.
This analysis of the underlying conditions complements the focus on the award-winning solutions: what makes an idea viable? Which structures take it from development into the market? And how does innovative strength translate into concrete impact?
"Innovation, to us, means developing technology that delivers real value in the day-to-day operations of businesses. This is precisely why we have built engomo as an industrial application platform that enables companies to implement customised applications for production, warehousing and logistics more quickly – AI-supported, integrated, and robust enough for critical processes. Receiving the German Innovation Award in Gold therefore confirms our ambition: innovation must not only be visionary, but also work reliably in everyday operations."
