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Defining your prize goal: lessons from the Homegrown Innovation Challenge
31 October 2023
There’s a key moment in prize design when setting a target, which requires you to consider where on the continuum you want to land, between a broadly-defined goal, or a laser-focused, highly-specific objective.
Good reasons to go narrow include drawing attention to a specific goal that we can measure progress against. Good reasons to fear going narrow are that you might go for a topic so niche that you seriously restrict the range of teams interested in competing, or you pinpoint a challenge that’s too difficult or otherwise does not fulfil a definable purpose.
A good reason to go broad is to support a portfolio of viable related technologies rather than focus all energy and resources on a single result. A bad reason to go broad is that you hope to revolutionise a broad area rather than solving a specific problem: in practice, without a clear and specific target for the prize, your teams will pick their own favoured goals and so will the judging panel. The individual solutions will end up being just as specific; it’s just that they’ll focus on specific things you might not have picked.
In the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, we worked with the Weston Family Foundation and their expert advisors to set a fairly narrow goal: creating and demonstrating whole systems that are capable of growing berry crops year-round in Canada. (Though we had considered going even narrower – specifying one particular berry crop to ensure a completely level playing field).
Where we landed – not all crops, not a specific crop, but a category of them – has ensured that the solutions have remained focused on the challenge we set while creating just enough flexibility that we have a portfolio of different growing systems suited to different crops. So – big picture, we got this call right.
We did, however, hope that there would be some more general impacts from our teams’ technology. Couldn’t we expect, for instance, that in designing an innovative growing system for raspberries, the team might also move the dial on other crops like blueberries or redcurrant?
In practice that hasn’t really been the case – innovators are laser focused on optimising their tech for the very specific use case of the crops they’ve chosen. There will be some useful experience and technology development which can be adapted for other crops – and we’ll find out more as the teams trial their solutions in the next phase – but it’s unlikely that any of our finalists will have a truly multi-purpose, off-the-shelf solution that is easily applicable to multiple crops. And by extension, that there is no silver bullet to guarantee where and how a prize is going to have transformational impact in a whole ecosystem of solutions, beyond the specific goal that was set.
There is no silver bullet to guarantee where and how a prize is going to have transformational impact in a whole ecosystem of solutions
Prizes do lead to diverse solutions, even when focused on a narrow goal
During the design phase of the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, the team had a (good-natured!) running argument about what the winning solutions might look like.
In theory, prizes are a way of stimulating multiple approaches to meeting the same ultimate goal. In practice, we often go into a prize with a sense of what the most likely path to solving the problem is. Sometimes we are pleasantly surprised – other times, our assumptions are confirmed.
Within the team, one school of thought was that, in practice, the big challenge was one of energy (heat, light and the plant-feeding CO2 that is often associated with energy production) – and that the growing systems entered into the prize would probably, at their core, rely on novel energy systems embedded in largely off-the-shelf greenhouse designs.
The other school of thought was that there are a whole range of things that you might do, individually or in combinations, to make the growing of berry crops indoors viable – not just the energy systems, but the growing media, the nutrient mix, the plant genetics, the design of greenhouses, and a plethora of AI and robotic tech to support it all.
The semi-finalist cohort endorses that second school of thought: almost all of the teams are innovating multiple components of the growing system, and not one team is focusing solely on the energy system.
And that’s strong evidence that a challenge prize – that’s open to this wide variety of technical approaches – was a genuine value-add for this programme, because the inherent openness of the approach lends itself to a proliferation of creativity and innovation, whereas traditional grant programme tends to focus on a single approach.
