Nesta launches Centre for Challenge Prizes

25/4/12

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills and Nesta today announces the launch of the UK’s first ‘Centre for Challenge Prizes’ – a hub for bringing together expertise in designing and running challenge prizes to tackle social and technological challenges in the public interest.

Challenge Prizes offer a reward to whoever can first or most effectively meet a defined challenge. They act as an incentive for meeting a specific challenge, rather than an award for past achievements. High profile examples the Ansari X-Prize for manned private spaceflight, the 18th century Longitude Prize to help British navigators and the 20th century Schneider Trophy for aviation, which inspired the Spitfire.

In December BIS announced, as part of its Innovation and Research Strategy, that Nesta would establish a centre for expertise on challenge prizes.  The new Centre will be run by Nesta and will:

• Act as a hub to bring together expertise and discussion on challenge prizes. It will to generate and share learning and insights on the design and use of challenge prizes,  build a practitioner group, develop and contribute to research projects with UK and international partners and run events and group discussions
• Design and run new challenge prizes with a range of partners. Two prizes will be launched later this year. The first will be a carbon data prize which will encourage the development of new inventions to help people monitor and manage greenhouse gas emissions and energy use. The second will comprise a set of prizes to get more of the UK cycling regularly. Further information about these prizes will be announced later this year.

Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of Nesta, says: 'There's great renewed interest in the role that prizes can play in motivating innovation.   At their best prizes can reach people who don't have access to mainstream networks and funding sources - and they prompt more lateral ways of thinking.   This is a perfect time to set up a centre that's not only expert in the practical details of designing and running prizes, but can also help others so that the field can grow.'

Minister for Innovation David Willetts says: 'For many decades, challenge prizes have acted as a powerful tool to stimulate innovation and help respond to important social challenges. 

'That's why we're proud to support the launch of the UK Centre for Challenge Prizes, which will bring together scientific and commercial expertise to design prizes that really benefit society by solving some of the most pressing innovation problems we face.'

There has been a significant growth in the number of challenge prizes launched over recent years. They can be an attractive problem solving tool as they can attract new innovators with fresh thinking to meet a challenge, focus attention and effort on challenges that have been neglected, or that have proved difficult to solve through mainstream research efforts, capture public imagination and generate widespread interest in a new field of endeavour. They can also encourage dramatic advances by setting ambitious goals, and limit financial risk by awarding a prize only when the challenge is successfully met. New technologies are also making it possible to share briefs with a much wider audience, opening up more possibilities for collaboration on solutions and attracting new, and greater numbers of, innovators to respond to a challenge.

The Centre for Challenge Prizes has been developed in response to this increasing interest in, and use of, Challenge Prizes, and aims to become a central hub of expertise on prizes.

To coincide with the launch, Nesta is publishing a landscape review on challenge prizes, which includes historical examples of prizes, the different types of prizes and references research into their effectiveness. To download the review and to find out more about about the Centre for Challenge Prizes, visit www.nesta.org.uk.

-          Ends  -

Notes to editor:

For further information, please contact Jan Singleton on 020 7438 2606/ jan.singleton@nesta.org.uk or Guy Bilgorri on 020 7438 2611/ guy.bilgorri@nesta.org.uk

Further examples of Challenge Prizes:

• Netflix, an online film rental company, offered a $1 million prize in 2006 for new recommendation software that could predict 10% more accurately the movies customers would like than Cinematch, their in-house software at the time
• The Virgin Earth Challenge is a $25 million prize for creating a viable technology which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years without countervailing harmful effects
• The $30m Google Lunar X Prize (one of the X-Prize challenges) calls for privately-funded spaceflight teams to compete in successfully launching, landing, and then travelling across the surface of the Moon with a robot, while also sending back to Earth specified images and other data
• Nesta's Big Green Challenge ran from 2007-2009, and offered a £1 million prize to the community-based groups who could have the biggest demonstrable measurable reductions in CO₂ emissions in a community.  Finalists achieved CO2 reductions of 10-46% in just one year. Set against the context of the UK target behind a 34% reduction by 2020, this was a significant achievement.
• In 2006, Prize4Life partnered with InnoCentive to launch the $1M ALS Biomarker Prize with the goal of accelerating the development of a biomarker-an inexpensive and easy-to-use tool that can accurately measure the progression of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in patients. In 2011 the goal was achieved  and the prize was awarded to Dr. Seward Rutkove for his identification of a biomarker which marked a significant step forward in ALS research.
• In 2008 the Scottish Government launched the £10 million Saltire Prize for innovation in the field of renewable marine energy
• European Commission is also showing an interest in challenge prizes, for example they recently announced they will launch a 'European Social Innovation Challenge' in memory of Diogo Vasconcelos, to encourage new social innovations from all over Europe 
  

Launch event

The centre is being launched at Nesta on Wednesday 25^th April between 8am and 11am. Speakers at the event include:

• David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science
• Jason Crusan, Director, Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation at Nasa
• Cristin Dorgelo, Assistant Director for Grand Challenges, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President (via video)
• Geoff Mulgan, CEO, Nesta.

The event provides an opportunity to hear more about the Centre. There will also be the opportunity to take part in discussions on how challenge prizes can be used to stimulate and support innovation.

To register for this event, please contact Guy or Jan in the Nesta press office. 

About Nesta

Nesta is the UK's innovation foundation. We help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. We do this by providing investments and grants and mobilising research, networks and skills.

We are an independent charity and our work is enabled by an endowment from the National Lottery.

Nesta Operating Company is a registered charity in England and Wales with a company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SC042833. Registered office: 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE

www.nesta.org.uk