Challenge prizes can make Britain into Sunak’s scientific superpower

This week has brought us big news for the future of science and tech in the UK.

The Prime Minister wrote an op-ed in the Times, on his vision of making this country a scientific superpower. The new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology published its ‘Science and Technology Roadmap’ – a policy document setting out detailed steps for how to turn this vision into reality.

Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse published his long-awaited review of the research ecosystem. And the government announced £250 million of new funding to support three technologies of the future: quantum, artificial intelligence and engineering biology.

The Times featured my letter about all this – alongside Sir Adrian Smith, the president of the Royal Society, and Prof Dame Anne Johnson, president of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

I agree with Rishi Sunak that the most impactful applications of these technologies won’t come from the same old institutions that dominate the research and development landscape. The PM and the Nurse report both highlight Focused Research Organisations – a new kind of science startup – as a promising new model.

But there’s another model that needs to be in the mix too: bold, ambitious, technology challenge prizes, like Challenge Works’ Longitude Prizes on Antimicrobial Resistance and Dementia.

If the government were to use this funding to strategically bolster UK entrepreneurs and inventors using methods like ours, we might be able to “get” growth the way our colleagues do in the US, as expressed so well by William Hague earlier this week. The appetite is there.

Challenge prizes can boost British industry

Challenge prizes set an ambitious goal – but allow creative researchers and inventors come up with novel ways of achieving them. The best demonstrated solutions win cash prizes.

It’s a more nimble model, open to creativity, and inspires unusual suspects to partake – a huge contrast with the risk-averse, play-it-safe approach that traditional government R&D funding takes. (Small wonder so much of it ends up with big companies like Rolls-Royce.)

The UK government has dabbled in prizes before – they co-sponsored both of our Longitude Prizes. But I think it’s time they took the plunge and supported a strategic programme of Longitude Prizes – a portfolio of big bets for UK entrepreneurs and inventors. These prizes wouldn’t just boost British industry in strategic sectors, they would solve problems that our country faces.

Prizes have unlocked innovation in the space sector in Canada and the US. Why not here? 

A prize could, for instance, focus on developing the situational awareness of spacecraft unlocking exciting transformational services like generating solar power in space – supporting the UK’s thriving satellite sector.

The interface of life sciences with engineering is an incredibly promising area, as this week’s funding announcements attest. Creating new materials, producing food more efficiently, even restoring ecosystems that we’ve damaged: challenge prizes could drive this promising area of technology towards solving real-world problems that affect us all.

In AI, we could build on the example of our Longitude Prize on Dementia, which focuses innovators’ efforts on creating AI-enabled tech. The aim is to help people with dementia live independently for longer. What other big societal problems could we use prizes to spur AI research in?

In the United States, the government and philanthropic have transformed markets using challenge prizes.

The Ansari X Prize played an outsized role in the development of commercial space, in particular space tourism. The Grand Challenge, a series of self-driving car prizes run by innovation agency DARPA, established many of the key players in today’s autonomous vehicles sector.

The UK needs to learn from their lesson. As William Hague said, we need to provide “capital for talented people to take intelligent risks” – and we can guarantee challenge prizes will help give the UK the boost it needs to catch up.

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