Why focus on technology frontiers?

Most of Challenge Works’ prizes start from urgent needs or problems that need to be solved – and our challenge prizes deliver and support the innovation to solve them.  But innovation isn’t just driven by demand. It can also come from the supply of new ideas. Technology can let us do things we didn’t realise were possible, or solve problems we didn’t realise we had.

That’s the focus of our prizes and consultancy on technology frontiers topics.

Our prizes in this field take advanced technology – new ideas that haven’t yet been fully explored, new breakthroughs in science and engineering – and direct them towards goals that can benefit us all.

We’ve already awarded major prizes that take this approach:

• The Mobility Unlimited Challenge, awarded in 2020, took advances in smart devices and robotics, and challenged innovators to find ways to use them to reinvent assistive tech for people with paralysis. The result: the Phoenix I smart wheelchair.
• The Open Up Challenges, three challenge prizes we delivered between 2017 and 2020, took important under-the-hood changes in the technologies that underpin banking, and challenged fintechs to come up with new tools that improved competition and customer experiences.
• We also advised the European Commission on their Horizon Prizes, which created applications for advanced technologies including microlaunchers.

Taking cutting-edge technology and using challenge prizes to drive innovation towards social goals underpins some of the most exciting and impactful challenge prizes that have been run around the world. Our Technology Frontiers focus will help us to do more of this.

These prizes don’t just unleash the potential of new tech, they don’t just solve real-world problems. They are drivers of economic growth and creators of whole new markets.

It’s an approach that echoes the UK government’s innovation objectives. As science minister George Freeman said on 11 January, the UK’s objective of being a ‘science superpower’ and ‘innovation nation’ rests on taking strategic bets about critical technologies of the future – like AI, quantum and engineering biology.

He promises support for research, but also, crucially, turning that research into real world businesses that commercialise the applications of these technologies and contribute to economic growth.

The government has made promising statements about prizes’ place in the remit of the new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), and we look forward to the deeper commitment to technology challenge prizes in the UK that this augurs.

How DARPA’s frontier technology prizes created the autonomous vehicles sector

ARIA is modelled on the US innovation agency DARPA. And DARPA’s Grand Challenges for autonomous vehicles in the early 2000s are a great example of how challenge prizes can harness the technology frontier and transform it into real world businesses. 

This series of annual challenge prizes took as their starting point recent advances in sensors and AI. From those technological foundations, the prizes kickstarted a whole new industry around driverless vehicles. Suddenly, this was a serious market, with serious players, huge investments and shared objectives. Many of the high tech driving aids that modern cars offer, and the autonomous vehicle divisions of major tech companies, can trace their genesis back to DARPA’s prizes.

But the legacy is longer than that. In the early 20th century, the Orteig and Daily Mail prizes took the military and hobbyist aircraft that existed at the time, and challenged designers and aviators to turn them into useful forms of transport that could carry people and goods over long distances. The first flights across the English Channel and the Atlantic were the result. 

We live with the legacy of these prizes to this day. What will the legacy of Challenge Works and our prizes be?

Watch out for our future posts, and some exciting prize ideas we’re exploring. And get in touch with the team if your organisation could sponsor or collaborate on one of our prizes.

Learn more about technology frontiers