Nemetschek Innovation Award 2026 (up to €200,000 in prizes) Deadline: 31 August, 2025

Applications are open for the Nemetschek Innovation Award 2026. The Nemetschek Innovation Award is dedicated to ground-breaking innovations in Artificial Intelligence for the Built World throughout the entire lifecycle of built facilities.

It is funded by the Nemetschek Innovationsstiftung (NIS) (Nemetschek Innovation Foundation) and aims to recognize application-oriented innovations. The competition procedure is managed and organized by the Georg Nemetschek Institute at Technical University of Munich (TUM GNI). The submissions are assessed by a Special Award Panel consisting of international referees who are appointed by the President of TUM.

Candidates are invited to present software applications in pre-product stage for the analysis, creation, construction, operation, renovation and management of buildings and civil infrastructures. Topics that are particularly eligible for consideration are primarily machine learning, intelligent interfaces, context-sensitive uncertainty analysis, knowledge-enhanced decision making, and AI-supported process automation.

Awards

• The first-place prize is €100,000
• The second-place prize is €60,000
• The third-place prize is €40,000

The first place is only awarded for epoch-making innovations and is not necessarily granted in each round of the Awards.

Eligibility

• Undergraduate students, graduate students and doctoral students from universities worldwide can take part in the competition.
• Participants must be registered at a university or comparable institution at the time of application (intention to submit deadline).
• The completion of a degree, doctorate or PhD after admission to the competition does not affect the right to participate.
• It is encouraged that teams of participants apply – there is no lower or upper limit on the team size. The team members have to share the prize money among themselves – TUM GNI will not judge on the share of individuals in the presented solution.

Application

The “Declaration of Intention to Submit” must be submitted by August 31, 2025 at 24:00 CEST in electronic format via email to contact.gni@tum.de. Delayed submissions will not be considered any further.

The declaration must comprise the following documents (in PDF format): 

• Cover letter, signed by all team members
• Contact information, including official email addresses of each team member at their university
• Proof of registration at the university, e.g. a copy of the registration certificate, for each team member
• CVs of all team members
• Maximum 5-page sketch describing the planned submission 
  The description should highlight the innovative character of the planned submission. It should clearly specify its relation to Artificial Intelligence and to applications for the Built World (architecture, engineering, construction, operation).
  The description can contain text and figures. In can also include references to supplementary material, such as links to publications, videos or code repositories. However, they will not necessarily be taken into account for deciding on eligibility.

Deadline: August 31, 2025

For more information, visit Nemetschek Innovation Award.