Centre for Challenge Prizes

Designing great challenge prizes

Vicki Purewal - 28.05.2012

This is the second in a series of blogs summarising discussions about the role and design of challenge prizes at our Centre for Challenge Prizes launch (the first blog can be read here). We were lucky enough to bring together some brilliant individuals and organisations from a range of sectors, which generated some useful and interesting discussion, so we wanted to share some of the key points.

Here's a summary of points from the second question discussed on the question "Which for you are the most important features in the design of a challenge prize?"

There following points came up across several of our eight tables:

• The importance of clarity in what's being asked of participants - especially in the description of the challenge itself (someone said if you can't say it in one breath it's too complicated), and also across the whole process.
• Getting the right specificity of the challenge - there was mixed opinions on how specific you need to be to set an effective challenge that will stimulate innovation.  There was broad consensus that setting a specific challenge is good.  There were also warnings that by being too specific you can start to prescribe solutions and limit innovation.  There were some suggestions that you could become more specific in defining the goal through the process.
• Being clear how far the prize expects participants to go with their ideas - getting this right could help ensure the winning ideas are those that have a good chance of achieving longer term impact, as opposed to simply being the most interesting at the time.
• The level to which the challenge is exciting was seen as important - it should inspire people to get involved, including new talent in response to a challenge, and should potentially inspire new collaborations.  In relation to this branding also came up a lot - the importance of getting this right, including relevant, and of having a strong brand.
• Being genuine - competitors must believe it's a level playing field and you want their ideas, and you should be genuine in this endeavour.
• Setting the size and nature of the prize - more is not necessarily better and cash is not necessarily the biggest motivator, with intrinsic motivation, reputation, signalling and validation all often being important.  Some common experience found that a financial prize drew people in, but then wasn't the most important motivator once entrants had started participating.  We've also found that motivations can change throughout the process of a single challenge prize.
• Consideration of what happens around the prize, especially when people exit the process - helping ensure promising ideas that don't make to the final stages keep going; feedback arrangements for winners and losers; matching both the promising and winning ideas to other people/organisations who can help realise them; helping winners, and other entrants if they are successful, on the path to scale.  This links to the final question we discussed, about how challenge prizes can work strategically alongside other mechanisms to support innovation (summary on that coming soon).

Other points that came up included the importance of the transparency; consideration of the use of stages in a prize; consideration of potential IP issues - including who owns it and how you deal with challenges about the source of entrants ideas; and consideration of timescales - with some people saying that setting a goal where the end it challenging but in sight can be effective, and some also advocating setting an end point.

The first in this series of blog posts, which talked about which issues challenge prizes could have the greatest impact on, is here.

The next will summarise discussion on the question "what don't you know yet about challenge prizes that would be really useful to know?"