Centre for innovation prizes

NESTA is establishing a centre for innovation prizes. This will be a hub for expertise in designing, setting up and running challenge prizes to tackle social and technological challenges in the public interest.

Prizes that offer a reward to whoever can first, or most effectively, meet a defined challenge can be a powerful way of encouraging innovation.  These prizes, referred to as challenge or inducement prizes, can be effective in:

• galvanising organisations and people around specific challenges that have been neglected, or that have proved difficult to solve through mainstream innovation and research systems or market mechanisms;
• encouraging more radical advances by setting ambitious goals;
• attracting new, and greater numbers of, innovators to respond to a challenge;
• providing value for money and lower risks for funders by paying for results

There has been a growing interest in the use of challenge prizes in recent years and we are establishing the Centre in response to this interest.

We expect that the centre for prizes will:

• Provide expertise on identifying suitable topics for, designing and delivering challenge prizes - in partnership with and on behalf of others
• Generate discussion and evidence on when and how challenge prizes could best be used
• Act as a hub to bring together prize practitioners and researchers, and people and organisations who are interested in, or could benefit from, challenge prizes

We'll be working with leading UK and international experts in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors over the coming months to design in more detail what the Centre will do and how it will work.

The Centre has been announced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.  The Department will also invest £250,000 per year in a prize fund, to be used by the Centre to run inducement prizes that spur new innovations.

We welcome interest and thoughts on the Centre.  Please register your interest below.