In designing the challenge
We are currently working on a prize to design digital tech that enables people with dementia to live independently for longer.
Assistive tech is a bit behind the curve, so part of this is in understanding what’s doable based on what the state of the art is in other fields. But it’s also about thinking: what is possible in a few years’ time, with some hard work? How much progress can we ask teams to make towards the problem we’ve set?
And how can we design our prize – the timescales, but also the success criteria, the level of ambition in our challenge statement, the proposed testing and innovator support – to get us as far as possible?
When we design a challenge prize, we discuss our draft challenge design extensively with potential innovators who might enter. We need their feedback on whether our plans make sense.
For the dementia prize project, we convened a workshop on Zoom with innovators from around the world to test our thinking in January. But it’s remarkable that even in the company of tech entrepreneurs, it was so easy to default to thinking about the near term – what they could do in 3, 6, 12 months.
They were smart people, and I’m sure they could do amazing things in that time. But what we’re interested in is what they could achieve if they had the luxury of several years to create breakthroughs, rather than just incremental improvements, in their technology.
We’re still working up this prize design, so watch this space – but part of being ambitious in this case has been about taking a calculated risk; a leap of faith.
And, based on everything we’ve learned throughout our months of work – in choosing a topic, picking a problem, defining a challenge – having the imagination and courage to set an ambitious goal.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the future hasn’t happened yet.
You’ll only shape it if you try.