News – Blog
Lessons from designing the Homegrown Innovation Challenge
11 May 2022
Guest blog by Tamara Rebanks, Director of the Weston Family Foundation.
In this guest blog, Tamara Rebanks at the Weston Family Foundation reflects on the process of developing the $33-million Homegrown Innovation Challenge, sharing lessons and key takeaways for others.
For many, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call for thinking on food availability and supply chains — from bare shelves in supermarkets and processing factory closures, to freight delays and lost harvests – it’s increasingly clear that more action needs to be taken to build the resilience of food systems worldwide. Similarly, with the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables being vulnerable to climate shocks, many organisations committed to positive social impact have started to look at ways to support sustainable food systems.
In early 2021, reflecting on these twin realities and our commitment to advancing the well-being of all Canadians, the Weston Family Foundation started to explore how it could contribute and play a meaningful role in catalysing much-needed innovation in this space – in particular, we were curious to know how/if new innovations in food production could cultivate greater self-sufficiency and help Canada adapt to future uncertainty. After all, a resilient food system is key to not only ensuring food availability, but also the health and wellbeing of Canadians, and the country’s ability to withstand systemic climatic shocks.
Further inspired by the Barton Report from Canada’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth (Dominic Barton is now chair of the Homegrown Innovation Challenge judging panel) – which identified agriculture as a sector where Canada has substantial growth potential given its trusted food supply, resource availability, land and research talent – we started working with Challenge Works to explore how the challenge prize model could be tailored to reflect our goals, taking us beyond our established grantmaking approach to support innovation funding and take a new approach to the big challenges of today.
Over a period of twelve months, our organisations committed to a robust research agenda: we set out to really understand the opportunities and challenges from a multitude of perspectives. Enlisting local and global experts through a series of interviews and workshops, coupled with desk research and engagement with trusted partners, this period of discovery showed us that Canada’s over-reliance on imports, coupled with growing public awareness of the need for sustainable and environmentally-friendly-growing practices, means there was a timely opportunity to improve Canada’s ability to produce fresh fruits and vegetables out of season at home.
Working with Challenge Works, we zeroed in on the opportunity to support the development of technology to extend the growing season of fresh produce and, if we succeeded, would both reduce the country’s dependency on imported fresh fruits and vegetables and increase the resilience of Canada’s agricultural sector. This became our problem statement and set the direction for the challenge, from the application process to the judging criteria.
For funders committed to social impact, working through Nesta Challenges’ design methodology helps to incentivize innovation while rewarding a diverse pool of collaborators.
Here are a few other takeaways about why the challenge prize development process appealed to us:
A laser focus on finding a solution to a specific problem
Grantmaking is typically more of an open process and applicable to many contexts. By design, challenge prizes set a clear goal for innovators to work toward. We learned that through thorough design, you can set an ambitious but not impossible goal and, when coupled with the right incentives, then you can help ensure progress is being made that wouldn’t have been otherwise.
The process is grounded in delivering clear results over a defined timeframe
We learned that unlike grants, where your specific approach is typically confirmed upfront, challenge prizes reward the best solution based on outcomes, leaving room for participating teams to pivot over this longer time period as they test and iterate and as technology naturally evolves. Further, the element of competition and the fixed end date of challenges accelerates progress that you can measure at each interval to the end.
The design process helped challenge our assumptions
The challenge methodology meant our assumptions were tested at each juncture. For example, was Canada best placed to do it? Like many countries around the world, Canada is not the only country facing climate challenges. Yet, Canada’s experience of weather extremes – made even more extreme through the effects of climate change – along with its socio-economic profile and long agricultural history make it an optimum test-bed for experimentation and innovation.
Today, we’re still actively recruiting to the Homegrown Innovation Challenge: we’re calling on ambitious innovators to develop market-ready systems for growing berries year-round in Canada on a commercially-viable scale. The team that successfully completes the Challenge could be awarded up to $8 million in funding from the Weston Family Foundation. By solving the interconnected challenges that come with growing berries out-of-season, we’re excited to see how the challenge will further catalyze a range of solutions relevant to a broad array of other crops in Canada and around the world.
