News – Blog
15 February 2022
Neil Armstrong’s small step, famously, relied on a giant technological leap. And, technological leaps can’t happen without lots of smaller problems being solved.
The Apollo Program was arguably the most ambitious government innovation programme of all time, and certainly one of the most focused. So it is inevitable that its language now permeates innovation-speak.
Apollo’s mission – to land on the moon by the end of 1969 – could hardly be clearer.
And the technological achievement of the moonshot, in addition to the landing itself, included breakthroughs not just in aerospace but, for instance, in computing and communications hardware that had to be created along the way.
Governments talk of “mission-led” innovation – the value of setting clear, Apollo-like targets for innovation funding. This includes the UK Government, as discussed in our ‘Mission Possible‘ piece.
Similarly, Californian tech investors are seduced by “moonshots” – ambitious technological leaps that, like Apollo, unlock progress and make the impossible possible.
Challenge prizes tend to work best when they are part of a mission: when they contribute towards a broader objective, rather than just focusing on a technology breakthrough, shorn of any context or purpose. Most of our past prizes, whether explicitly or implicitly, are tied to clear objectives like these.
Challenge prizes don’t have to be moonshots though. In fact most of our flagship prizes aren’t: we usually focus on quite specific barriers or opportunities that lie in the path of an ultimate moonshot goal further in the future. With the timescales and resources typically awarded to prizes (a few years, a few millions), this kind of focus is usually the sweet spot for focusing innovative activity.
The Longitude Prize focuses on the barrier of inadequate diagnostic testing, which stops us from using antibiotics more wisely. The Mobility Unlimited Challenge focused on the opportunity of bringing in more smart and robotic tech into the disability sector. Open Up focused on the lack of proven business models that used open banking tech.
These challenges usually take a bit of explanation – not just because we need to articulate why their specific focus contributes to a bigger moonshot goal further down the line. But also, often, in the details of what exactly it is that we’re asking innovators to develop in return for the prize money.
But a challenge prize can focus on a moonshot goal itself – a bigger but simpler challenge that’s as easy to explain as it is hard to solve. One which doesn’t just focus attention on a narrow barrier or opportunity, but on a bigger technological breakthrough that needs many smaller problems to be solved along the way.
The Weston Family Foundation’s Homegrown Innovation Challenge, which launched last week, is maybe the purest example of this we’ve worked on to date. WFF’s objective is to reduce Canada’s reliance on imported fresh fruits and vegetables by supporting the creation of tech that lets crops be grown out of season in the country’s harsh climate.
With a typical prize pot of a few million dollars, we could have focused the challenge on important incremental technology development: on creating cheaper sources of heat for greenhouses; on building robotic tech to pick crops in vertical farms; or on developing lighting that can help plants grow in the dark winter months. These would have been great prizes with real impact.
But with a prize pot of C$33m and a timeline of seven years, we were able to work with the Weston Family Foundation to design the prize to shoot toward an even loftier goal.
And so, instead, this challenge will reward a team who can build and demonstrate a complete system that can grow berries out of season in Canada. Innovators don’t just need to improve an individual component – but to create an entire system, and to show it works. That means innovating the science of the plant itself; the energy systems it uses; the soil, compost or substrate the plants grow in; the lights; the robots; the training; even the software that keeps everything running smoothly.
Over the next seven years, we’re looking forward to seeing how the innovators tackle this ambitious challenge. Solving this moonshot is in and of itself important: Canada imports a lot of berries, they’re valuable and they’re highly nutritious. But if we’ve done our work right, the fruits of their work won’t just be revolutionary solutions that grow ripe berries in the middle of Canada’s winter – but scores of spinoff technologies relevant for upping agricultural production across a wide range of crops and countries.
