News – Thought Leadership
The UK Innovation Strategy should embrace challenge prizes
22 July 2021
The Government’s new Innovation Strategy intends to make the UK the most exciting place in the world for innovators.
Through an increase in annual public R&D spending to a record £22 billion, the strategy aims to fuel businesses that want to innovate. It wants to see R&D institutions serve those business needs to promote a healthy nationwide innovation ecosystem. It will do this by “stimulating innovation in technology and missions that will provide the UK with strategic advantage” to tackle, head-on, the greatest challenges of our time.
Though this morning’s announcement does not set out what the new “innovation missions” are, we can make a solid guess based on some of the strategic technologies that were highlighted: clean technologies, robotics, genomics and artificial intelligence.
These are all areas where cutting-edge British businesses are excelling – they provide ample economic opportunities for all parts of the country if supported to grow into global industrial leaders. Where detail is perhaps light today is on how best to achieve it.
We’ve already seen the announcement earlier this week of a £375 million investment fund for the UK’s high-growth, innovative and R&D intensive companies. Since only those that have secured 70% of an investment round from private investors can access that money, it does seem like that specific pot of funding is going to companies that aren’t struggling to raise money. I’m not sure this will contribute to making Britain the most exciting place for innovators or level up the innovator ecosystem.
Encouraging multiple approaches
That’s alright though; the lesson we learn from challenge prizes is that one size does not fit all.
We know that challenge prizes work precisely because they encourage multiple approaches and allow for different solutions to solve the same problem. We tend to find that having multiple solutions (whether or not they win) go on to contribute to solving their problem each in their own way in the long term.
The same can be true for today’s innovation strategy.
The ambitious funding increase, the mission-based focus and the desire to translate Britain’s R&D prowess into business success builds a landscape in which new and multiple approaches to innovation can be harnessed in exciting and high-impact ways.
In the last year, The UK Government has indicated that challenge prizes can be a key contributor to the new innovation strategy, recognising their potential to promote business growth and productivity throughout the UK.
As the new strategy reflects, up until the mid-20th Century, the UK had a long and notable record of using challenge prizes to incentivise great technological advancements: from the 1714 Longitude Prize – the world’s first challenge prize – to aid maritime navigation, to the global aviation prizes of the 1910s, 20s and 30s.
Due to the work of Challenge Works over the last decade, the knowledge and capacity to use challenge prizes to solve the big problems we face in the 21st Century has been re-established in the UK.
Challenge prizes should be a consistent feature in the strategy
That it looks like prizes could become a consistent feature of the government’s innovation strategy is hugely exciting. It is an extraordinary opportunity for the diverse and dynamic network of innovative businesses in the country to contribute to the future success and prosperity of the nation.
To incentivise the ground-breaking innovations that will solve the biggest problems we face and deliver long-lasting economic prosperity for the whole of the UK, we need to ensure the new strategy leaves a legacy of globally competitive businesses that remain at the forefront of technological innovation. We are encouraging the UK Government to ring-fence an ambitious fund for challenge prizes and harness the world-class expertise that now exists in the UK – thanks to Challenge Works – to deliver it.
A series of flagship, high-profile, challenge prizes connecting the technologies and missions in the innovation strategy to the army of innovative businesses across the country would fly the flag for the UK plc’s R&D expertise as we charge forth to achieve net zero before 2050, level up the economy for the entire nation and secure the UK’s position at the vanguard of the global economy.
Challenge prizes are a distinct method of driving innovation that require entirely different expertise to other funding instruments. Challenge Works knows how to get challenge prizes right.
