Working with the Canadian Government on Challenge Prizes
Tris Dyson — Executive Director Centre for Challenge Prizes, Nesta
Finding innovative solutions to today’s complex environmental and social challenges requires diverse skills and creative thinking. Gone are the days of the lone inventor hitting on a solution — today’s challenges require collaboration, bringing together people with different skills to try and solve problems in different ways. And often, the usual suspects aren’t the only ones with good ideas.
Over recent years challenge prizes have seen a renaissance as tools for innovation.
Challenge prizes pose a specific question and offer a financial reward to anyone who can solve it the fastest. Not only do they draw in more innovators from wider fields, but they come up with better solutions.
Prizes aren’t a new idea. The Longitude Prize, launched in 1714 was aimed at finding a solution to accurately measure longitude at sea. John Harrison created a portable clock that did just this, and won over £23,000 — because knowing the time is the key to accurately navigating by the stars. But just as importantly, a range of other inventors won smaller prizes from the Board of Longitude. The Longitude Prize didn’t insist that the solution had to be a clock — and so among the winners were wildly different approaches to the problem, from new astronomical methods to improved designs for the sextant.
The radical openness of the original Longitude Prize — almost complete agnosticism about what the solution should look like — is remarkably well suited to the way innovation works today.
In 2014, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act, Nesta launched a new Longitude Prize: this time, it is to help solve the alarming rise of drug-resistant infections. Poor use of antibiotics over the past 70 years means they are getting less effective, just as the supply of new antibiotic drugs is slowing: we’re losing the race against the superbugs. And there isn’t much incentive to solve the problem either. Drug companies aren’t incentivised to sell fewer drugs, nor are doctors rewarded for not prescribing them. So the new Longitude Prize is all about creating new diagnostic tests that tell people whether or not they need antibiotics — reducing the widespread misuse that leads to resistance.
But beyond a few key criteria, we’re open to any reasonable way of solving the problem. It could be solved by engineers, doctors or chemists; they might solve it with a machine, a reagent or some smart software. Providing it fulfils our 8 criteria, including cheap and accurate, we don’t mind.
So far, 250 teams in over 40 countries have registered to participate in the prize. And in recognition that not every contestant starts from a level playing field, we’ve handed out over £250,000 in seed funding to promising teams — including one round focused specifically on the impressive, but undercapitalised biotechnology sector in India. This is important. It’s not just a question of being fair; it’s making sure that all the teams who can bring a meaningful contribution are able to take part.
We’ve seen this in a number of our prizes. In the Dynamic Demand Challenge, a prize we ran to help make electricity use more eco-friendly, two of the finalists have gone on to great commercial success: Upside Energy and Powervault both unlocked significant new investments following being shortlisted.
We want to use these prizes to solve problems faster and better — making the most of talent, ideas and motivations out there, wherever they may be.
That’s why we’re excited to be working with the Canadian Government that are now making a concerted and pioneering effort to develop prizes to solve problems faster and better in Canada — ranging from opioid detection technologies, to food security and housing.
The first question though is what are the problems that need open innovation?
