Centre for Challenge Prizes

Being innovative about innovation prizes

Bryony Everett - 15.03.2013

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation once said: "Solutions to many of the world's most difficult social problems don't need to be invented. They need only to be found, funded and scaled." She's right.

The knowledge and technology to live in relative comfort and safety is all around us - from energy, housing and health services to mobile phones and washing machines - but the world's poorest communities are not benefiting. It's up to the development community to ask itself why poor people's access to everyday technology is so limited, and how we can change this.

Innovation prizes are designed to encourage change - they challenge people to solve problems by rewarding them with a prize that may be as small as a public pat-on-the-back or as large as millions of dollars. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of prizes put up to help solve technical problems. These prizes promote research and development to solve very specific problems. Although research is limited, evidence indicates that technology prizes open up problem-solving to a much wider audience, which in turn results in innovative answers to problems from unexpected sources.  What technology prizes don't do, however, is help get technology to those who need it.

If prizes can help with the solving of technical problems can they also do the same for social and market related problems? Can we use prizes to encourage people to solve the range of problems associated with giving the poor access to technology and services? I think so. There are a few examples of innovation prizes that focus on getting technology to the poor or encouraging communities to use available technology. Prizes such as Nesta's Big Green Challenge, the Nirmal Gram Pursarkar (NGP) in India and the recent Haiti Mobile Money Initiative (HMMI) are all really interesting innovation prizes that work to improve access and uptake of modern technology and services by poor communities. We have a lot to learn from these prizes. Evaluations of the HMMI and NGP are promised and will help us understand how we can use innovation prizes in an innovative way. The success of Nesta's Big Green Challenge is already well documented.

It is my view that the prize industry and donor community - in tandem with the continued promotion of technology prizes - needs to increase the trialling of innovation prizes to encourage adoption and use of existing technologies and services. A number of new initiatives including AgResults (Proposed by G20 in June 2012) and the Making all Voices Count Programme (funded by DFID, USAID, Sida and the Omidyar Network) are starting up, more are likely to follow. An important role, right now, for the prize community is to document and share lessons learned in prize design and implementation, so that we can effectively use prizes to help solve some of the world's most pressing problems and ultimately get life-enhancing technologies into the hands of those who need it most.



To find out more about Nesta's current challenge prizes see the Centre for Challenge Prizes or to find out why we think challenge prizes are going to be big this year see our predictions for 2013. 

Bryony Everett (Bryony is a Principal Consultant at IMC Worldwide with a particular interest in innovation prizes for International Development.  She is author of "Using innovation prizes to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals" MIT Innovation Journal Winter 2012 Vol. 7 No.1 Pages 107-114 and the DFID "Evidence Review on Environmental innovation prizes for Development" 2011)