Collaborative mission

Vicki Purewal - 02.05.2012

At the Centre for Challenge Prizes launch last week we were lucky enough to bring together some brilliant individuals and organisations from a range of sectors. As well as great speeches from Jason Crusan, Director of the new Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation at NASA and David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, we also had some great discussions thanks to the wealth of expertise, interest and ideas in the room.

Highlights from the speeches, which you can watch in full here, included Jason Crusan talking about the range of ways that NASA has used open challenges and the importance of challenge prizes being mission driven. Clearly this has specific connotations for NASA! But of course Jason is talking also about mission in a wider sense - challenges should be clearly linked to business and/or social goals. The Minister, David Willetts, gave a positive and open speech highlighting the potential value of open challenges to government.

The buzz and connections made in the room during the discussions that followed the speeches reflected our ambition for the Centre - to be a hub for expertise, knowledge generation and practice on challenge prizes.

We posed four questions for discussion and there were interesting points and common themes emerging from each of these. Over the next few weeks we will post a summary of the points from each of the discussion questions on this blog.

Here's a summary of points from the first question discussed:

On which issues could challenge prizes have the greatest impact?

The strongest area of consensus on this question was the collective opinion that prizes can drive behaviour change, both because they can galvanise people around a particular issue and because of they can build new communities and collaborations.

Another strong point of consensus was that prizes should be used to answer questions/challenges where you don't know the answer.

An opinion from several participants was that prizes should have a public good agenda – regardless of the type of challenge set (even for technical challenges). There was an appetite for challenges with a specifically social focus, though it was highlighted that this is not easy – particularly when it comes to defining the challenge and measuring success.

Other points to note were:

The potential of challenge prizes to cross existing silos
The risk of politics or marketing strategies driving prizes, rather than need
That ideas for prize topics could (some thought should) be crowdsourced
That the definition of successful impact depends on the challenge – a small change might be insignificant in relation to one challenge but might represent a major leap forward in relation to another

Possible appropriate challenge areas suggested by participants included transport, green technology, waste reduction, dementia, young people and employment.

Summaries will follow over the next few weeks on the following questions:

Which for you are the most important features in the design of a challenge prize?
What don't you know yet about challenge prizes that would be really useful to know
Where could challenge prizes be used with other tools to find and scale great ideas?