What is the Smart Data Challenge Prize?
The Smart Data Challenge Prize is a £600,000 challenge prize funded by the Department for Business & Trade, designed to identify and develop Smart Data use cases across the economy.
Building on the success of the Smart Data Discovery Prize launched in 2023, this prize will now move beyond ideas and demonstrate how cross-sector Smart Data solutions might work in practice, generating insight into the opportunities and the challenges of Smart Data-powered innovation.
The Prize will give up to ten selected innovators access to a specially created Data Sandbox, giving them the tools and data they need to explore and develop their ideas into prototype solutions and demonstrate how Smart Data can transform services across sectors.
The selected innovators will benefit from grants of £50,000 and prizes totaling £100,000, as well as a range of non-financial support.
Who’s involved?
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£0 billion is the amount that GDP
could increase thanks to new commercial opportunities created by personal data mobility, and Smart Data will be key in unlocking this.
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Over 0 million customers and small businesses
are already benefiting from Open Banking services as of February 2023.
What is Smart Data?
Smart Data is the collective term for technologies and policies that will enable individual consumers and small businesses to securely share data that organisations hold on them with other authorised organisations they trust. These, in turn, will be able to use that data to provide consumers with innovative services.
Smart Data is already a reality in the UK for bank current accounts, in the form of Open Banking. In the future, it could expand into a range of other consumer sectors, including energy, retail and transport, as well as other financial services such as savings and investments, mortgages and insurance.
New ways of mobilising data will create opportunities to empower consumers, increase competition and sustainably grow our economy. It is estimated that new commercial opportunities created by personal data mobility could increase GDP by £28 billion per year, and Smart Data will be key in unlocking this.
What was the Smart Data Discovery Challenge?
The Department for Business & Trade, Challenge Works, the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Smart Data Foundry called on individuals, innovators, entrepreneurs, academia and civil society to join them in identifying innovative ways in which Smart Data could make a difference for consumers, small businesses and wider society.
Between 26 October and 8 December 2023 we ran an open call for cross-sector Smart Data use case ideas. We invited individuals and organisations to share their bold cross-sector use case ideas for a consumer-driven Smart Data economy. The most promising cross-sector use case ideas submitted in the open call were then selected by an expert panel and further defined with the help of expert input.
The Discovery Challenge culminated on Thursday 21 March 2024 at an event for the emerging Smart Data community. During the event, the teams behind the 14 most promising ideas pitched to an expert judging panel and Smart Data audience, and four teams were selected as the winners, sharing a prize pot of £20,000.
