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.
Read more of our learnings from this Challenge