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.