The world of Tata Steel is one without boundaries - growing, changing and challenging, a world that embraces different skills, continuous innovation, sustainable growth and a better quality of life.
Tata Steel’s sustainable growth and technology leadership aspirations are driven by innovation in multiple areas primary among them being in the domain of New Materials beyond Iron and Steel. At Tata Steel, we are actively pursuing research in Advanced Materials.
Tata Steel Advanced Materials Research Centres (TSAMRC) have also been established to achieve this aspiration, one at Chennai in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM), and the other at Bengaluru, in collaboration with the Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS). The objective of these Centres is to work closely with academia and other centres of expertise to strengthen the portfolio of advanced material research and its applications.
With ever emerging needs, requiring new generation of materials or technologies around the world, Open Innovation approaches are gaining importance and are being increasingly adopted by organizations to feed their innovation funnels to address the problems/challenges identified.
MaterialNEXT, an Open Innovation event hosted by TSAMRC is an effort to increase the richness factor of the innovative ideas in advanced materials domain. Explore Design Innovate with Tata Steel MaterialNEXT.
MaterialNEXT is a flagship event by Tata Steel across Pan-India and is based on key themes/challenges already pre-identified by Tata Steel.
MaterialNEXT 2.0 (2021)
MaterialNEXT 2.0 will have 2 tracks:
MaterialNEXT 2.0 will have 4 Challenge/Theme Areas open to both tracks.
The event would consist of 3 Major Phases: Selection, Performance and Finale. After registration by teams, the Selection Phase is a 2-stage process of an online screening followed by discussion-cum-evaluation stage, conducted by subject matter experts from Tata Steel & external mentors. The selected entries will progress to Performance Phase. Performance Phase ends with an evaluation (Pre-Finale) round.
The Selected entries from this phase qualify for the Finale Phase and will be called for the Gala Grand Finale to decide winner and runner-up.
Winner and runner-up teams from both the track gets awarded with cash prizes. Also, post-event mentorship and grants for next level of development will be provided, if applicable.
MaterialNEXT 1.0 (2019)
The 1st edition of MaterialNEXT was conducted in 2019 in collaboration with the Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Madras. The event offered a chance to the budding researchers, technology developers and enthusiasts in the field of advanced materials, to propose, produce and present their solution model to experts for the 4 different industrial challenges posed.
The first edition, involving three phases, received a registration of a total of 32 teams and 11 teams were selected. In the second phase, teams were given eight weeks to work on their preliminary proposals. The top five teams, selected at the end of second phase, moved to the third and final phase of grand finale. The grand finale was held on May 15, 2019 in Chennai.
Team BION from IIT Madras, which created an innovative solution and prototype using Graphene Oxide (GO)-based flexible sweat sensors, won the first edition of the MaterialNEXT.
Team BION, comprising Dr. V.T. Fidal Kumar, Dr. Chithra Lekha P, Dr. S Balamurugan and Ms. Desika Prabhakar, was mentored by Prof. T S Chandra from IIT Madras and Dr. Chandrani Pramanik from Tata Steel
Novel coating materials for
✓ Direct/Ready to paint coating
✓ Hybrid MM functional coating
✓ Thermal management coating
Novel FRC materials as
✓ Bio-composites
✓ Natural fibres based
✓ Other advanced composites
Novel recovery process for precious metals in EV Batteries (excluding Lead-Acid batteries)
✓ The treatment method must be scalable and easy to implement
Novel materials and systems for
✓ In-Vitro application (diagnostic devices, assistive devices etc.)
1. Participants must first register their team on event portal (https://materialnext.tatasteel.com/) to create login credentials. Teams of 2-4 people should be formed to participate in the event.
2. All correspondences between the organiser and the team will happen through the registered email-ids of the team. All submissions in this event portal must be done through the unique login credentials generated and shared with teams during registration.
3. Participants must login (https://materialnext.tatasteel.com/) and submit the idea as per prescribed format in any one Challenge/Theme area under any-one track (Research/ Start-up).
4. In the event of selection of submitted idea, participants would be notified for subsequent stage guidelines for submission, evaluation rounds etc. along with deadlines.
5. In the event of idea being dropped at any stage of the event, Participants would be notified and their login credentials would be blocked.
Winner and 1st runner-up teams from both the track gets awarded with cash prizes and mentorship, grants for next level of developments, if applicable.
Research Track: Registered PG/Ph.D students & Research Scholars from academia/Research centres
Start-up Track: Incubated Start-ups in Seed and/or Series A funding level
For any queries, please connect us at:
Email id: materialnext@tatasteel.com
Phone nos: 7033094837 , 7763807455