Centre for Challenge Prizes

Inspiration and lessons from Longitude

Vicki Purewal - 11.10.2012

This week I read some very thoughtful comments on prizes in a blog post on The Guardian website by Rebekah Higgitt of the National Maritime Museum. 

The post, focused particularly on science prizes but with wider relevance, talks about the Longitude Prize as an inspirational and much referred to historical challenge prize and reminds us that this prize was not as straightforward as people might think - the prize design shifted and multiple incentives and rewards were put in place at a number of stages before the final prize was awarded.

We experimented with a staged and supported approach to giving a prize ultimately based on results with the Big Green Challenge.  In this prize, which ran from 2007-2009 we had a very open first stage, selected competitors to receive support at a second stage, and selected Finalists who received more non-financial support and a small grant, before selecting the winners based on the Finalists with the most successful results. We're experimenting with this model again currently on a smaller scale currently with our Giving challenges.  

Using a staged approach certainly seems to have its advantages.  In the right context it seems that a staged approach can help funders take a managed risk in working with people with no track record, can help strengthen ideas and developing innovations, can help keep competitors motivated and can create value for those who don't ultimately win.  There is now a rapidly growing number of organisations using competitive, staged approaches linked to a specific challenge, across grant programmes and investments as well as prizes.  

Of course for prizes there isn't one homogenous design.  When setting up a prize there are several decisions to make about the structure and format - whether the prize recognises past achievements or incentivises new activity; whether a staged approach is used; at what point and on what basis to award the prize; the scale of the prize and whether it is cash or not; whether smaller incentives and/or support are offered throughout the process etc. It is possible to use prizes in combination with grants and investments, and today there are exciting opportunities to combine with tools such as crowdfunding and new forms of procurement and commissioning.  The combination of prize design features will have a strong impact on the results achieved, and the design decisions should be led by the prize aims.  The Longitude lessons and our own experience also show that it can be useful and necessary to adapt the design of the prize during the process.  

It's great to see more discussion, debate and practical work happening on challenge prizes.  The Centre for Challenge Prizes is keen to hear from other organisations running and experimenting with the design of these prizes, so that we might learn from each other's approaches and share insights.