The Great Innovation Challenge: How challenge prizes can kick-start the British economy
What’s next? None of these are weaknesses that mean these initiatives should end – rather, they should be complemented with institutions and methods that behave differently. Institutional reform is already on the agenda. Indeed the institutional landscape has already changed substantially in recent years. The reason challenge prizes are even part of the debate in the UK is down to government investment in creating Nesta Challenges in 2012. On a larger scale, the formation of UKRI and the integration of the research councils, the creation of the Catapult Centres and Scottish Innovation Centres and new research institutions like the Crick and Turing all show a willingness to innovate with the institutional foundations of innovation in the UK. These all addressed identified weaknesses in the innovation landscape, from lack of coordination and strategic direction to provision of facilities and support. The promise of an ARPA-style body, with a budget of £800m to spend over five years and a remit to fund high-risk and high-reward projects18 has been presented as a radical and disruptive addition to this landscape (though as we have seen, innovation is no stranger to institutional change). Speculation has been rife: how the ARPA-style body will actually operate has been the subject of vigorous debate,19 and the R&D Roadmap offers promising language around breakthrough technologies, long-term thinking and innovative funding mechanisms. Done right, alongside the Wellcome Trust’s new Leap Fund, it could have the freedom and institutional culture to make some of the bold, big bets that the UK’s current institutions and methods mostly do not – and address some of the weaknesses in grant funding by taking more risks, being more flexible and engaging more deeply with outcomes and less with process.20 When it comes to innovative methods, the path forward is less well defined. The Industrial Strategy has provided a coherent narrative and set of missions that take a step towards methodological innovation, but it has been delivered through the usual mechanism of R&D grants. The Chancellor has hinted at a more heterodox approach to innovation methods, including a reference to ‘new funding models’ in the budget,21 and the R&D Roadmap goes some way further to outline these, but there is still plenty to do to articulate exactly what the right innovation funding toolkit looks like.
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