The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how rapidly innovation can advance health systems in response to a health crisis.

The speed of vaccine development has been unprecedented. New, digitally enabled surveillance and tracking techniques were rolled out on a global scale. Data sharing and cross-border co-operation saw clinical procedures established and tested to fight a shared enemy. Innovation was unleashed, and became a crucial enabler to advancing a truly worldwide response to the pandemic.

The pandemic response validated the potential of self-diagnosis and increased use of remote and digital tools to improve peoples’ lives. But the pandemic also exacerbated inequalities between countries and highlighted the vulnerabilities of the growing elderly population in high income countries. Health systems worldwide struggled to cope with the COVID-19 burden, this was more acute for under-resourced settings.

Diagnostic tests and vaccines went to the highest global bidders. By September 2021, of the 3.2 billion diagnostic tests performed worldwide 0.4% were used in LMICs3, 1.9% of the 5.82 billion vaccine doses were administered in lower resourced settings. This inequity made people living in LMICs angry and they have begun demanding a larger role in developing, testing and manufacturing life-saving health technologies locally.

The unequal distribution of COVID-19 diagnostic tests and vaccines was deemed a “moral failure” by the Director-General of the WHO.

The inequity in global healthcare provision was put under the spotlight during COVID-19, but it is a far greater issue that reaches far outside the pandemic response, and is not limited only to low- and middle-income countries. It is a problem on a global scale, but one that can be solved with ambition and the right incentives.

Assistive tech for people living with dementia

Challenge Works’ prizes unearth the boldest innovations to improve healthcare. They are designed to make an impact for people in diverse situations, both in high- and low- and middle-income countries.

The Longitude Prize on Dementia – a partnership with Innovate UK and Alzheimer’s Society – is incentivising the creation of a new generation of AI and Machine Learning-enabled technologies designed to adapt to the changing condition of a person living with dementia, so that they can keep doing the things in life that bring them purpose and enjoyment.

Democratising access to surgery

Access to surgery in lower and middle income countries (LMICs) is stymied by a lack of trained surgeons and other practitioners that are performing surgeries. But most surgical training programmes are expensive and resource intensive.

They rely on access to cadavers, live animal training models and expensive technology-driven simulation-based training. Therefore, many LMIC-based practitioners often have less hands-on experience before operating on patients.

The Global Surgical Training Challenge is transforming training opportunities for general surgeons and clinical and medical officers that want to perfect or learn new procedures.

Effective upskilling means increased access for patients. For example medical officers who have been trained to perform bone fixation after a serious break will help ensure that patients avoid gangrene and potential loss of a limb.

Diagnostics for a silent pandemic

Antimicrobial resistance poses a significant threat to humanity. Described as a silent pandemic, in 2019, more than 1.2 million people worldwide – and potentially millions more – died as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

In a recent report, health leaders have warned that antimicrobial resistance has become a leading cause of death globally, killing around 3,500 people every day.

No new antibiotic has been discovered since 1962 for the treatment of Gram-negative bacterial infections. Testing plays a critical role in reducing antibiotic resistance by improving diagnosis of infections to prevent unwarranted use of antibiotics, and to rapidly detect and contain resistant infections.

The £8m Longitude Prize on AMR has incentivised innovators to develop rapid diagnostic tests to identify whether infections are bacterial, whether they require antibiotics and which antibiotic to prescribe.

Now entering its final judging period, multiple diagnostic tests have been developed in pursuit of the prize, aiming to cut the 3-day time to result of traditional diagnostic testing to as little as an hour. But it is only one piece of the puzzle, the world needs new antibiotics, new stewardship programmes and new approaches to treating infections.

Incentivising innovation beyond health

Outside of health, our prizes in disability and assistive technology also demonstrate the impact challenge prizes can have. The Mobility Unlimited Challenge – funded by the Toyota Mobility Foundation – incentivised innovators to reimagine the wheelchair, a design fundamentally unchanged for a century.

The winner, a Scottish designer, himself a wheelchair user, was awarded $1 million for the Phoenix i. The lightweight carbon-fibre chair uses sensors and AI to continuously shift the chair’s centre of gravity as its user moves – creating an intuitive experience for its user. Following the win in 2020, he is now on course to bring this revolutionary design to market thanks to the prize.

Challenge prizes galvanise innovators, entrepreneurs and industry disruptors to bring forward much needed solutions to complex and seemingly intractable issues. They are a tried and tested method of attracting new innovators to change the status quo.

We partner with institutions, foundations, charities and governments to co-design and launch challenge prizes that improve access to quality healthcare around the world.

Challenge prizes catalyse transformational change and mobilise the creativity of people from diverse disciplines at a global level.

Talk to us about the global health challenges you want to see solved and discuss how together we can develop bold prizes that incentivise innovators to address the most urgent national and international health needs.

More about Global Health

Challenge Works is teaming up with AARP and Canada’s AGE-WELL to encourage innovators across North America to apply to win the new Longitude Prize on Dementia.

The Longitude Prize on Dementia will reward innovators developing assistive technologies using AI and Machine Learning for people living with dementia. In the United States, 5.8 million people have Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, while in Canada, around a further 750,000 people are estimated to live with dementia.

£4.1 MILLION TO BE WON

The £4.1 m (US$4.9/CA$6.4m) prize  will award £3.1 million (US$3.7/CA$4.8m) in seed funding and grants to the most promising innovators, with a £1 million (US$1.2m/CA$1.6m) prize awarded to the winner in early 2026. Innovations should support people to remain independent in their own homes as long as possible – one of the best ways to slow the advance of the disease.

Funded by Alzheimer’s Society – the UK’s leading dementia charity – and Innovate UK – the UK government’s innovation agency – the Longitude Prize on Dementia is delivered by global challenge prize experts, Challenge Works.

TECH THAT BECOMES EXTENSION TO THE WORKING BRAIN

Opening for entries this September, innovators are invited to develop technologies that learn about the lives and routines of people living with early stage dementia, employing assistive technology and machine learning to adapt as their condition progresses. 

“We know that there are treatments around the corner but we want to change the way people are living with dementia now,” said Kate Lee, CEO of Alzheimer’s Society. “The Longitude Prize on Dementia will deliver technologies that become an extension of the individual’s working ‘brain’ and memory in a way that is specific to their needs – enabling them to continue living at home and doing the things they love for as long as possible.”

SUPPORT FOR NORTH AMERICAN INNOVATORS

Wider support has been funded to provide innovators with crucial insight and expertise, facilitating whatever they need to bring their ideas to life. 

In the United States, prize competitors may be invited to join the AARP Innovation Labs’ accelerator program. The program offers companies the opportunity to gain insight into the 50-plus market and have access to resources, including subject matter expertise, growth marketing strategy, consultations and more. To be eligible for the accelerator program, entrants must either be incorporated in or currently be in-market in the United States and must pass review by AARP. 

“AARP works every day to empower people to choose how they live as they age, and people living with dementia should also have that opportunity,” said Sarah Lenz Lock, AARP senior vice president of policy and executive director of the Global Council on Brain Health. “The Longitude Prize on Dementia will bring together some of the world’s best innovators to help improve the quality of life for people with dementia and their caregivers. It is our hope technologies developed through this prize will give people with dementia access to innovations that can help them maintain their independence.”

In Canada AGE-WELL’s long track record of supporting the development of innovations and technologies for health ageing, will be an essential partner in delivering tailored support to the innovators named discovery awardees in the prize in early 2023.

“New technologies in the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning offer an unprecedented opportunity to help people living with dementia to maintain their independence and remain longer in their own homes, said Dr. Alex Mihailidis, Scientific Director and CEO of AGE-WELL, Canada’s technology and ageing network. “We are really pleased to lend our support to this important new prize, which will tap into the spirit of innovation that abounds in the AgeTech sector.”

REGISTER NOW

The Longitude Prize on Dementia will open for entries in September 2022. Innovators who want to apply should register their interest at dementia.longitudeprize.org 

A new approach to funding is needed to unleash innovation from small businesses

Dear George,

We welcome the government’s aspiration to make Britain a science and innovation superpower, and its bold plans for new innovation missions, increased investment and the establishment of ARIA – a welcome commitment considering the economic circumstances. Of course, success will require that the private sector steps up too. We believe it should and it can, but that government needs to engage the whole of the private sector as it implements its Innovation Strategy – including small businesses. At the Budget and Spending Review last week, the government announced welcome plans to grow public R&D investment to record levels of £20bn by 2024. How do we ensure that more of this budget is allocated to micro and small businesses?

Our 5.8 million small businesses are the lifeblood of the British economy who sit at the heart of our communities. They generate half of UK revenue and employ 16 million people. Many of these businesses are driven by entrepreneurs who are moving their sectors forward. From plumbers who are using smart technology and hairdressers digitising their offering to microchip manufacturers and the diagnostic test developers, the renewable energy pioneers and the fintech entrepreneurs – these disruptors and game-changers want to take on the world.

They work nimbly to solve problems, breaking new ground every single day. They employ people across the country, tapping into local skills, knowledge and networks. Today’s start-ups are tomorrow’s scale-ups and they are often quicker to see the potential of new technologies and emerging trends than their bigger counterparts. If we fail to pull out all the stops to drive the growth of these future business success stories, the UK’s aspiration to be an innovative, high productivity economy will come to nothing.

‘How’ government supports our innovative businesses is as important as ‘how much’. The small businesses we talk to tell us that funding mechanisms to support innovation seem designed for the big players. Support programmes can be bureaucratic, unwieldy and opaque – too much focus goes on the process, not enough on the outcome. In these circumstances a small business of 15 people cannot hope to compete with a company of thousands for grants, even if it would achieve much more with the money – and so it doesn’t. We need to broaden funding beyond the big-name incumbents. The record increase in public R&D investment planned, including a welcome increase in Innovate UK’s budget, could be positive news for small businesses but it is critical that alongside the Budget, there is a friction-free application process to open up access to organisations of all sizes and reduce any barriers.

We need to encourage reasonable and calculated risk taking and achieve better returns by diversifying the companies receiving R&D funding. A culture that attempts to squeeze out any and all risk by relying on a handful of the same well-known companies is not going to deliver the transformational change that the Innovation Strategy is looking to deliver.

The new Innovation Strategy and its missions are a chance to re-set, alongside news of increased R&D investment.  This means designing programmes that are as open to brilliant micro-businesses as to established players. Looking beyond the big grants programmes of yesteryear, we need to add new mechanisms to the mix that level the playing field for small businesses like social impact bonds, advance market commitments and ambitious challenge prizes. We should reward the most effective solutions to problems, not simply those companies with name-recognition. Just as DARPA, the inspiration for ARIA, has successfully pursued open innovation and outcome-based funding models, so too should the new innovation strategy.

This is the chance to capitalise on the brilliance of our innovators in the millions of small- and micro-businesses in all corners of the country. To achieve science superpower status and find the technological solutions to our most urgent challenges, the new innovation strategy should cast the net wide to engage the entrepreneurs and problem-solvers that are currently overlooked. If it can keep barriers to entry low, employ a wider variety of funding mechanisms and double down on successes, it can propel UK R&D to new heights.

The UK’s small businesses are ready to rise to the challenge and deliver the innovations and solutions that will earn the country its place as an innovation superpower. The new Innovation Strategy must seize this opportunity to put them at the heart of the mission. A new approach to funding science and technology R&D is essential to tapping into their talent and harnessing their potential for the future.

Tris Dyson
Managing Director of Challenge Works

Emma Jones CBE
Founder of Enterprise Nation

Download the open letter as a PDF

ARIA – the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – is the new £800 million scientific research agency announced by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng. It draws its inspiration from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is designed to be unbureaucratic, to “embrace failure” and to invest in “high-risk, high-reward” projects.

The principle of ARIA is very welcome. Government funding is often inherently risk averse; civil servants are not traditionally instructed to ‘embrace failure’. A ‘small-c’ conservative approach to funding R&D, misses the most radical innovation and ideas. Too much funding is channelled towards subsidising the incumbents rather than finding the plucky upstarts. This is not good for diversifying innovation and it is not good for finding the next breakthrough technology.

The US DARPA embraces failure by showering huge amounts of funding on a swathe of innovators and ideas and then brutally cutting funding when things fail – by taking this approach they occasionally turn up pearls like the internet or driverless cars. DARPA is directly linked to the US Defense Department’s long-term strategy and procurement plans, which gives it a clear focus.

ARIA on the other hand, will have a much more limited budget and is not directly linked to the procurement goals of a government department. That means there is potentially less focus and also less room for finding the occasional breakthrough in a sea of celebrated failure.

One of the main findings from the Science and Technology report into the new agency rightly recommended focusing on central missions and linking these missions with government departments.

Prioritising areas of focus will make the search for pearls easier

ARIA can achieve its laudable goals, but only if it is sufficiently focused on areas where its more possible to predict likely pearls, and only if it is then selective about the innovation funding methods it uses to find them.

You can legitimately take bigger risks with ARIA only if you take greater care. The DARPA model has highly autonomous programme leads who are empowered to make big decisions about funding, without extensive oversight, because their approach is expert-led, data-led and they do their due diligence.

ARIA will require a strong capability in predicting potential technology pathways that combines a strong analytical approach to identifying where good innovation is coming from with a capability to think creatively about the future.

ARIA should carefully tailor how it enables innovation though funding

Kwasi Kwarteng has said that ARIA will experiment with funding models including prize incentives. This is also welcome.

The efficacy of traditional grants are limited in areas where there is high uncertainty. That’s because they fund activities rather than outcomes. This discourages the charge to ‘embrace failure’ because funding is given upfront. It is essentially an educated gamble and that means that stakes are more likely to be placed on those with more predictable trajectories.

One approach used by DARPA that should be deployed here is to combine grants with outcome based funding such as challenge prizes.

Challenge Works has published the Great Innovation Challenge which provides examples of challenge prizes used in the US including by DARPA and suggests areas of focus for breakthrough challenge prizes in the UK.

Another approach is to intelligently cultivate innovation with non-financial incentives – preferential access to regulators or high value data sets – as good examples.

ARIA should move at pace

The intention is that ARIA will be agile and free from bureaucratic impediments. This is the right instinct.

The recent NAO report of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund found that the government took 72 weeks to approve the challenges, and then a further 31 weeks to assess applications. Two years is a lifetime for some fast moving new technologies and ARIA needs to be much more agile. This is the driver to exempt ARIA from Freedom of Information laws, but this will backfire.

Radical openness and honesty is needed or distrust will undermine it. The public will expect to know what’s happening with public money and greater risk requires transparency and evaluation in order to determine what works.

ARIA is a welcome bold step, the instincts are good, but it will thrive or fail according to the methods it uses.

READ THE GREAT INNOVATION CHALLENGE REPORT HERE

We are busy right now: so many urgent problems. The coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it has brought. The imminent severing of decades-old trading arrangements with our nearest neighbours. And in the background the slow drumbeat of escalating ecological calamity.

Why on earth should we care about space?

Spaceflight, from its earliest days, was tied up in military interests and cold war politics. From the V2 missiles the Nazis rained down on London, to Sputnik and the Apollo programme, the pioneering moments in the history of space exploration were tied to flag waving – and to more or less veiled threats to kill. (Sputnik was launched, let’s not forget, on a modified nuclear missile.)

And that spirit is still here today – rockets as a national pride rendered in titanium and carbon fibre.

A distraction, or worse, in a moment of crisis, you could argue. Certainly not something to be focusing on now.

I think this view is wrong.

For while it’s true that space has always been about militaristic flag waving, it’s also always been about civilian uses.

As I wrote a few years ago, the first privately-built spacecraft dates back to 1961; satellite TV to 1965 – civilian uses of space date back to the very earliest days of the space programme.

And today, the overwhelming majority of the global space economy is private, not public. These are services that people are willing to pay for – to track the weather, to map cities, to transmit data.

The satellites far above our heads, tiny specks you see moving across the sky against the firmament on a dark night, are part of our critical infrastructure. Just as roads support almost every aspect of our government and economy, space-based services now enable sectors as diverse as entertainment, agriculture and construction.

Britain has done nicely out of this – we’ve carved out profitable niches in the space industry, including in services (like Inmarsat communications or Sky Television) and in satellite construction.

But the sector is facing change. A shift to more, smaller satellites (like Elon Musk’s Starlink communications system), and a more diverse range of companies launching them into space too.

Opportunities for the UK

As part of this shift, Challenge Works advised on a European Commission challenge prize to develop microlaunchers. These are small rockets capable of launching small satellites at low cost, without having to piggyback on major launches, which aren’t always available at the time that’s needed, or aiming at the right orbit. The prize is expected to be awarded in late 2021.

There’s a threat and an opportunity in this disruption. If the UK sits on its laurels, the successful industry we have could be at risk. But if we make smart decisions and investments, we could build on this success and seize the opportunities this market disruption brings.

With miniaturisation, microlaunchers and advances in robotic and computer technology, there are suddenly new opportunities to develop spacecraft design. These in turn could enable more, better or cheaper services – with wide benefits across all sectors.

What was Flying High?

Helping UK cities to shape the use and future of drones for good.
The Flying High Challenge was a collaborative engagement with cities, technologists and researchers, regulators, government, public services and citizens to shape the future of urban drone use in the UK to meet local needs.

Following a research and city engagement phase, the programme is now focused on developing innovation challenges, urban demonstrators and stakeholder and public engagement.

What are we doing?

Run by Challenge Works, in partnership with Innovate UK, Flying High was the first programme of its kind to convene city leaders, regulators, public services, businesses and industry around the future of drones in cities.

The first phase comprised a nine-month research and engagement process, working with five city-regions across the UK (Bradford, London, Preston, Southampton and the West Midlands) to develop visions for the future of drones and assess technical feasibility and economic and social impact of urban drone applications. The outputs of this phase, which also included mapping the UK drone industry and exploring the systemic requirements for integrating drones in cities, are summarised in the Flying High Report. 

The planned next phase of the programme will be to design a series of innovation challenges and develop test beds to pioneer safe, sustainable drone systems that deliver the benefits for cities and citizens outlined in the first phase.

The challenge objectives include:

• Shape city plans on the future of drones in UK cities, exploring specific applications of drones within cities and hazardous environments.
• Identify and address key complexities such as technology, infrastructure, law, regulations, safety and privacy.
• Detail technical and economic plans that unlock market opportunity through regulatory testbeds, open innovation technology challenges and live, real-world demonstrations.

We engaged widely with cities across the UK, central government bodies, the CAA, research and technical bodies and a range of other stakeholders to design this programme.

Watch this video to learn more about our work so far

Designing public services targeted to the older person

The number of people aged 60 years or older will rise from 900 million to 2 billion between 2015 and 2050 according to the World Health Organization.

This is significant and presents major challenges for governments everywhere. The UN’s ‘World Population Ageing’ report in 2015 stated “it is more important than ever that governments design innovative policies and public services specifically targeted to older persons”.

Since 2015, much work has been done globally to highlight the true impact and complex web of issues surrounding ageing. This includes rising healthcare costs, pressured pension schemes, housing issues, caregiving, and the impact of cognitive decline.

The reality is that, as we age, we are more likely to develop physical or mental impairments linked to or resulting from multiple long-term conditions such as cardiovascular disease or dementia.

The prevalence of disabilities, physical illnesses and mental health issues, such as depression and social isolation, increases as we age. These changes can have major impact on our quality of life and the ability to complete everyday tasks.

UK health and social care services are already strained by the ageing population. From increased demand and will need to focus more on early detection and better prevention, as well as approaches which help older people to better self-manage their conditions and live healthier lives.

Individualised solutions for a demanding population

While the world has woken up to the huge societal challenge – as shown by the wealth of research papers, policy documents and continual debate – actually developing solutions to solve the plethora of problems has been patchy.

However, user-focused technology is now changing that.

Digital technologies, digital infrastructure and data production are already revolutionising our day-to-day lives and hold the power to be transformative in supporting healthy and active ageing.

Digital solutions can automate aspects of the home and improve efficiency to make our lives easier. They can provide us with a greater degree of interaction and communication, provide personalised support and care, and allow health and human services to be delivered remotely.

A savvy ageing population

As the baby boomer generation ages, they – and their wallets – are demanding better designed and more sophisticated technology and will increasingly refuse to settle for stigmatising or unattractive products and services.

They increasingly want more technological developments and, perhaps most importantly of all, they want suppliers to focus on them as customers – not as patients, end users, or care clients.

Many of these technologies will create large cost savings for health and social care, by removing some of the need and/or desire for traditional public healthcare facilities.

Yet, this change won’t happen on its own. Significant barriers remain to be overcome such as interoperability between devices, institutional inertia, developing sustainable business models, and designing usable, functional and stylish products that people want to use. To name just a few.

Innovation as a strategy

The US is one example of a nation keen to harness technology to support its ageing population. In March 2019, the government released its new report ‘Emerging Technologies to Support an Ageing Population’ that highlighted six key ways in which technology has the potential to help people live longer, healthier and more independent lives. The report recommends Research & Development (R&D) and advances in technology to address the six challenges:

• Key activities of daily living (eating well, managing medication etc);
• Cognitive skills (training and systems to help individuals live safely and independently);
• Communication and social connectivity (in relation to hearing loss, social isolation and loneliness);
• Personal mobility;
• Access to transportation, and;
• Access to healthcare.

The report acknowledges that getting these cutting-edge innovations into homes and communities requires R&D across a wide range of disciplines spanning the public, private, and philanthropic sectors.

UK government’s plan to increase life expectancy

The UK government’s target for people to enjoy at least five extra healthy, independent years of life by 2035 can be achieved by harnessing the power of innovation to help meet the needs of the ageing society.

Under the Industrial Strategy Fund, the government is investing up to £98 million in research and innovation that supports people as they age, while also helping those that care for them – the Healthy Ageing Challenge is part of this solution.

Through the challenge, government will bring together UK businesses and researchers to support people to stay in their homes for longer, tackle loneliness, and increase independence and wellbeing – although the initiative is very much in its infancy.

Technology meets the National Health Service

It’s clear that globally, a spark has been ignited and there is now a strong appetite to develop technology-led solutions that address care, healthcare, independent living and cognitive issues.

In the UK, the NHS is taking technology seriously when it comes to an ageing demographic. One example is a tablet loaded with an app that gives practitioners access to all the data they need to deliver care, wherever they are.

A community nurse could use a smartphone to take regular photos of a bed sore to monitor its progress using the app, which colleagues can also securely access, supporting better clinical decision making and improving care outcomes.

Further afield, China, India and Japan are making great strides in developing responses to their ageing demographics. China is experimenting with entire urban developments designed specifically for the elderly. Scientists in India have developed the ‘MindEye’ that diagnoses dementia non-invasively by just tracking a person’s eye movements, before the symptoms even appear. In Japan, their rapidly greying society is demanding fast, technology-driven solutions such as the Shichifukujin app that collates data to manage diabetes.

Getting ahead of the game

While this is all encouraging, unlocking creative, fresh ways of thinking and new ideas in a timely manner is the priority; and waiting for researchers and business to deliver new innovations may not be the only answer.

With ageing presenting such a huge societal challenge on the very near horizon, leveraging innovators and inventors in today’s fast-paced digital age requires an additional mechanism – one that fast-tracks ideas through to effective products and solutions and seeks out ideas from non-traditional as well as traditional sources.   

Challenge prizes incentivising more people to consider the needs of ageing populations

One model that is proving to be a game-changer is the challenge or incentive prize initiative. They incentivise innovation from both in and outside of a specific sector, enabling the development of technology for issues that pose a current problem or are anticipated to be a problem in the future.

The success of the challenge prize model is largely due to the fact that it’s an open market initiative, encouraging submissions from everyone and anyone.

A solution could come from a teenager designing software in her bedroom, to a new start-up that desperately needs seed funding to develop its breakthrough idea.

Challenge prizes go one-step further than a grant or financial prize by offering additional support from experts and consultants, access to data sandboxes to test solutions, and introductions to new partnerships. Added value comes at the end of the challenge prize when all intellectual property is retained by the winners, enabling them to take their solution on to commercial development.

Challenge prizes are a global solution to global problems

The US has recently increased its number of challenge prizes recognising the value that they can bring to a variety of sectors by seeking new thinking from unlikely sources.

‘Challenge’ is open to members of the public to help the US government solve problems big and small. For example, the “Improving Care for People with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias Using Technology (iCare-AD/ADRD)” Challenge aims to improve the quality of care for persons living with Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias.

It stimulates innovation in the use of technology to improve care coordination and/or navigation and/or aid with the care experience, to improve the overall quality of overall dementia care.

Overcoming the ageing population challenge in the UK

In the UK, Challenge Works has been working with partners from the health, care, voluntary and social enterprise sectors to test and scale new ideas in ageing for a number of years.

Our effective challenge prize design experience means that, from concept to winner announcements, the whole process can be fast-tracked without compromising quality of response or deliverables. For example, in September 2012, we launched the Ageing Well Challenge Prize to unearth fresh ideas to reduce social isolation and/or help people stay mobile and active for longer.

The evolution of challenge prizes

Challenge Dementia finalists were announced a few months ago. This challenge prize was pioneered by Essex County Council and supported by Challenge Works alongside partners PA Consulting, Alzheimer’s Society and Tech UK.

They have developed an impressive range of trailblazing technology and design-driven innovations to improve the lives of people living with dementia in just under one year.

The beauty of the challenge prize was that one of the finalists was an 11-year old boy who had developed a personal solution featuring a touchscreen with a range of functions – all based on his experience with his great-grandfather who had dementia.

Since this blog was first published we have launched the Longitude Prize on Dementia. This challenge aims to find ways to use machine learning to help those in the early stages of the disease to live independently for longer

Longitude Prize on Dementia

Challenge prizes are opening up the field for innovation

Burgeoning social innovators, and those who are starting out today with little more than an idea drawn on the back of an envelope have many initiatives to mull over. Some of these ideas will only see the light of day thanks to forward-thinking initiatives like challenge prizes.

We will need to utilise the best ideas to address the many issues and challenges of our ageing population.

We have to open up the field so that everyone in society has an opportunity to play a part in designing support for our relatives, friends and neighbours. Challenge prizes provide this opportunity through their open market model. With very little time at our disposal, any way that we can leverage innovation is important not only to ageing individuals, but to our economy and society as a whole.

In the future drones could routinely be carrying out tasks in our cities. They might connect up hospital networks with medical sample deliveries, help emergency responders get to incidents more quickly, or even come out at night to fix potholes (seriously). This future is not a far off prospect – a large drone ecosystem has already emerged.

As part of the Flying High project we’ve mapped out the UK drone industry and found a thriving ecosystem of products and services that may surprise you in its size and scope. We’ve created what we believe is the most comprehensive database to date of UK civic and commercial drone industry players, and this has been turned into an interactive visualisation by Luca Bonavita from the Innovation Mapping team here at Nesta.

A full-screen version of the map is available here. Click the i in the top left for info on how to use the map.

In 2018 the Flying High Challenge, run by Nesta’s Challenge Prize Centre (as Challenge Works was then known), brought together a range of stakeholders in five UK city-regions to identify if and how drones might operate in cities to meet local goals.

But what did the public think about this fast-developing technology?

One fundamental requirement if drone technology and drone services are to operate in urban areas is support from the general public. But what do we currently understand about the public perception of drones and their potential uses?

As it turns out, a few different organisations have done research into this question.

Below we’ve highlighted some of the key recurring themes from the most recent studies we could find, which include:

• A UK Department for Transport (DfT) public dialogue ran in early 2016, involving three workshops in each of five locations across the UK (Aberystwyth, Manchester, Newry, Salisbury and Stirling);
• A Royal Aeronautical Society (RAS) poll of 2,043 British adults conducted in 2016;
• A 2016 USPS survey of 1465 adults from all over the US about public perception of drone delivery;
• A three country survey conducted by customer intelligence software company Vision Critical in 2014 in the UK, US, and Canada; and
• Our own Nesta-commissioned poll of 2000 UK adults, held in December 2017.

Awareness of drone technology is low – but familiarity correlates with more positive perception

The drone industry has expanded rapidly in recent years, with currently over 4,000 commercial drone operators in the UK alone, and growing adoption in construction, infrastructure inspection and agriculture.

However, studies have found awareness of drones and drone applications among the general public to be low, with most participants in the DfT study having low or no awareness of the civic and commercial uses of the technology, and a generally negative association with military and hobbyist use of drones.

The Vision Critical survey similarly reported awareness of all drone applications to be low compared with awareness of uses of manned aviation. This doesn’t appear to have changed much since, as Nesta’s more recent poll from December 2017 found that only around 30% of respondents felt that they had a good understanding of drones and their uses.

On the other hand, research shows that exposure to the technology tends to lead to a more positive perception. Exposure enables people to gain more awareness of the potential for beneficial uses, as well as some of the build quality and safety features of drones.

Participants in the DfT consultation were overall more positive about drones after the workshops than at the start. The UPS study in the US found that exposure to information about drone delivery correlated with enthusiasm for the idea, and also that younger people tended to view the technology more positively.

Indeed our own anecdotal experience of attending a recent police drone demonstration in Birmingham confirmed the positive impact of seeing drones and drone applications first hand.

The operator is key – emergency services are most trusted, general public the least

All the studies we looked at show that the use and user are decisive factors in how positively drones are perceived.

The DfT study found that use by the state, in particular the emergency services, is the most well-received, followed by use by commercial operators, while the use of drones by the general public tends to generate concern.

These findings are corroborated by our own Nesta poll, the Vision Critical poll and the RAS survey.

The latter found 91% of respondents support drone use for emergency response and 83% support drones being used for police intelligence. That is compared to 81% in favour of infrastructure inspection, 78% for agricultural uses, and only 37% supportive of drones being used for leisure activities.

Safety, privacy and accountability concerns dominate

The idea of large numbers of cameras being flown in the vicinity of your house by an unknown, potentially untrained person is something that can understandably cause anxiety.

Invasion of privacy was the biggest concern highlighted in Nesta’s survey (74% of respondents), followed by safety concerns. In the RAS survey the difficulty of tracing drone operators was the most frequently-cited concern (79% of respondents concerned). This was closely followed by breach of privacy (75%) and threat to personal / public safety (74%).

These factors ranked significantly higher than other issues such as noise pollution (36%) and access to commercially sensitive information (57%).

The same themes run through the DfT consultation, which highlights anonymity and traceability as key issues, as well as safety. Safety worries resulted in part from the build and functionality of the drone itself. However, they were particularly focused on the capability and intentions of the operator, given the potential for accidents or misuse by terrorists or criminals.

Privacy concerns were also significant, and extended across all operators. Not only were people worried about individuals and companies being able to obtain personal information using drones, but also the state’s ability to watch us without our knowledge, potentially aided by facial recognition technology.

Again in the Vision Critical study, although there was broad support for police and emergency service applications of drones, support varied with the precise use.

Approval dropped significantly when considering police use for general surveillance patrols not in an emergency context, and for use in the enforcement of traffic rules and to identify particular individuals at events such as political protests.

Drone delivery is the most contentious use

In the short term drones are likely to be used in cities to monitor construction and infrastructure, by the media, and by the emergency services. However, in the longer term drone delivery, whether it’s of blood samples or pizza or something else, could become commonplace and have a major impact on cities.

Drone logistics could mean large scale deployment and changes to the built environment such as dedicated take off and landing sites or increased pedestrianisation.

However, in the RAS survey only 32% of respondents approved of drones being used to deliver packages. Only the futuristic and potentially transformative use – delivery of people was less popular with only 22% of respondents were in favour.

The UPS survey looking specifically at perception of drone delivery in the US found that 44% of Americans liked the idea, compared to 34% who opposed it, with the remaining 22% undecided.

This is a little surprising considering that only 32% of respondents thought that drone delivery would be safe. Here the biggest concerns were around drone malfunction (44% most concerned), theft (16%) and intentional misuse of some kind, including invasion of privacy (14%). However, the more people had heard about drone package delivery, the more they tended to support it, with 75% of people who had seen or heard a lot about drone logistics being in favour of the idea.

The study ended up concluding that it was too soon for drone delivery to be accepted, but that this may not be the case for long.

Implications of drone technology for future city skies

The drone world is moving so fast that this research could rapidly become out of date. However, there are some enduring messages in these studies for cities wishing to explore drone applications.

All of these studies emphasise the importance of communication and transparency around developing drone systems. People need to be informed and able to input into decisions around how drones are used. If people are to support drone use they must be familiar with the technology and the benefits to citizens must be clearly communicated.

If public acceptance is a key factor in driving adoption, we can expect early drone applications in cities to be those with an obvious social benefit, such as supporting emergency response, or improving safety on construction sites by removing the need to work at height.

In all applications developers and operators will need to prove that there are adequate safety, security and privacy safeguards in place, to citizens as well as regulators.

One thing that all of these studies indicate is that as people become more familiar with the technology (as many young people are), civic and commercial drone use in our communities is likely to become more normalised in one form or another.

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