Centre for Challenge Prizes

Public Sector Prizes across the pond

Vicki Purewal - 26.10.2012

Papers are now online from the US Public Sector Prizes event organised by the Case Foundation, the Joyce Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology policy  earlier this year.

Back in June I was lucky enough to be able to visit Washington to speak about the Big Green Challenge as a case study and to learn more about the US approach to using challenge prizes in the public sector at this day-long event.  Attendees came from across government and from other public sector agencies and the day covered sessions on practical examples, legalities and prize design considerations.  It was great to be able to speak with such a range of brilliant people leading the way on the use of prizes in the US.

The US has particularly embraced the use of challenge prizes over recent decades. The $10m Ansari X-Prize for private space flight (awarded, 2004) broke new ground in modern challenge prizes, and the X-Prize Foundation now runs large scale prizes in other fields. DARPA have successfully applied the concept to focus on driverless vehicle technology. Nasa routinely use challenge prizes to aid technology development. 

The US government has now undertaken a focussed effort to promote the use of challenge prizes across the public sector by issuing a government-wide memorandum in 2010, followed by legislation (also see this link) and by creating challenge.gov in 2011, which has already hosted over 150 US challenges from across federal agencies. More recently the White House Office of Science and Technology policy has worked with Nasa to set up a Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, focussing on challenge prizes. Jason Crusan from this Center visited Nesta earlier this year to help us launch the Centre for Challenge Prizes.

There are many common themes emerging in the parallel growth in use of challenge prizes on each side of the Atlantic.  In both cases there has been a broadening in the use of challenge prizes - from mainly science and technology focussed challenges and audiences, to include more social challenges and wider audiences.  I would say there has also been an increase in numbers of inducement prizes focussed on a specific challenge, and that of these a greater number are giving prizes to ideas vs working prototypes or evidence of results.  There is also an increase in experimentation with different prize designs.  This is exciting and also, at this point in the development of prizes, a bit confusing.  As an example, the Big Green Challenge was pitched at the event as a participation prize.  I've also heard it described as a number of other models and we've called it a social challenge prize.  I've heard similar confusion in discussions about other challenge prizes (and challenge-based open innovation models). This is not to say that any of the descriptions are wrong, but it does suggest that we have further to go with understanding different emerging approaches.

In the US and also in the UK and Europe government is increasingly showing an interest in using prizes, and departments/agencies are starting to experiment with their use. Both the Centre for Challenge Prizes at Nesta and the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation at Nasa have been developed in collaboration with government.  The biggest difference is that in the UK, and more widely in Europe, public sector engagement with challenge prizes is growing organically and in the US it is being directed from the top tiers of government.  It will be interesting to follow both approaches, and to share learning across the pond both at a policy and individual prize level.