Centre for Challenge Prizes

Centre for Challenge Prizes launches

Vicki Purewal - 25.04.2012

Today we launch the Centre for Challenge Prizes at Nesta.

In our blog in December I talked about how challenges prizes can be a very effective way to generate innovative solutions, as well as how they are not a new tool but are becoming an increasingly popular way to generate solutions to complex problems.  More on this can also be found in our new Challenge Prizes Landscape Review.

We have set up the Centre for Challenge Prizes to act as a hub for building knowledge about prizes across a range of sectors, and for disseminating this across the UK and beyond.  We will design and manage challenge prizes to deliver specific public benefit, and will generate and share learning and insights on the design and use of challenge prizes, working with a range of partners.

Examples of what we will do include:

• Running challenge prizes across a number of different topics.  One of the initial prizes we run will be on innovations to generate newly accessible and user friendly carbon data to help people monitor and manage greenhouse gas emissions and energy use.  This summer we plan to launch a set of prizes to help get more of the UK cycling regularly.  We are also developing ideas for social innovation prizes.
• Build a practitioners' group to enable the generation and sharing of learning between designing and running challenge prizes
• Developing and contributing to research projects with UK and international partners
• Running events and group discussions

To the Centre, Nesta will bring our experience of running innovative funding and support programmes, including challenge prizes; our ability to bring together expertise from across broad sectors; and the understanding we've built and continue to build, with a range of organisations and individuals, about the broader ecosystem of how to get new ideas developed, adopted and spread for public benefit.

For the past four months we've been working closely with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to set the Centre for Challenge Prizes up.  In that time we've been lucky enough to have had feedback and to hear about prize experiences and developments from lots of organisations, including: the Technology Strategy Board, 100% Open, NHS Challenges, The Saltire Prize, IP Group, London Business School, Euclid, Innocentive, RSA, Nasa, White House OSTP, New Philanthropy Capital, Co-operatives UK and Nordic Innovation.

In establishing topics for the initial prizes we will run, we've also worked with lots of brilliant experts in cycling and in carbon data, as well as experts in potential future topics - more on that to come over the coming months.

It's going to be a really exciting first year for the Centre and we're looking forward to working with some great people and organisations from a range of sectors to make it happen.