Sidel’s Nextgen Innovation Lab brings together young engineers from across the world to solve real industrial challenges

Nineteen engineering talents from ten countries have completed Sidel’s Nextgen Innovation Lab, spending three weeks exploring real-world challenges in packaging, sustainability and automation.

Held at Sidel’s Octeville-sur-Mer site in the north of France, the programme brought together university students to collaborate with Sidel experts on real industrial challenges, including: sustainable operations and packaging, digital technologies and industrial AI, robotics and human-machine collaboration, computer vision and AI-based inspection for quality and mechatronics and intelligent machine control.

Designed to strengthen connections between academia and industry while inspiring the next generation of engineering talent, the three-week programme combined technical workshops, site visits, customer engagement and hands-on project work. The group of 19 worked in teams to develop proof of concepts, prototypes and business cases, before presenting their final results to a panel of senior Sidel leaders and technical experts.

The programme ended in an awards ceremony recognising outstanding achievements across five categories, including Best Overall Innovation, Most Customer-Centric Solution, Most Disruptive Concept, Most Inspiring Speech and Most Ready-to-Apply Solution.