The Joseph M. Brillhart IDEA Innovation Award highlights how collaborative district energy efforts deliver meaningful benefits across a wide range of constituencies, including customers, communities, institutions, stakeholders, the environment, and society at large.
The award provides a platform for IDEA members to share emerging best practices and collaborative applications that advance the industry. Its focus is on smaller-scale, practical initiatives—distinct from the IDEA System of the Year—that demonstrate processes, approaches, or programs that can be replicated and more widely adopted by others.
The Joseph M. Brillhart IDEA Innovation Award is not intended to promote a commercial technology, product enhancement, or proprietary innovation for the purpose of commercial recognition. While a technology or product may be part of a successful project, submissions should emphasize the collaborative application and outcomes rather than a product-centered or proprietary solution.
Presented annually at IDEA's Annual Conference & Trade Show, the award is evaluated in four main categories:
- Ingenuity: the technology has to be a new technical, business, or operating practice that shows ingenuity.
- Measured Success: the technology must be working for a sustained period of time with demonstrated efficiency success that can be measured.
- Replicable: the innovation must be replicable, meaning that this idea can be easily applied elsewhere.
- Economic & Environmental: the innovation must demonstrate economic and environmental benefits.