Mission Possible: The role of challenge prizes in a revitalised UK Innovation Strategy
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The Government’s Innovation Strategy – investment, reform and strategic direction The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted starkly both our vulnerability to shocks and our deep dependence on the power of science and innovation. The pandemic elicited an unprecedented response from the UK’s science and innovation ecosystem, bringing progress in vaccine development and distribution that surpassed almost all popular expectations at the start of the crisis. As the UK Government’s Innovation Strategy published in July 2021 puts it: “[D]uring this COVID-19 pandemic, our innovation ecosystem has come to the rescue.”1 But far from these successes being a cause for complacency, the Innovation Strategy sets out a bold new vision for the UK’s science and innovation ecosystem, building on its world-class strengths but reforming the way we do things where this is needed. Resources are part of the story: UK investment in R&D, public and private, remains stubbornly low by international standards2 and the Strategy reaffirms pre-pandemic plans for an historic increase in public funding for R&D. But the primary objective of the Strategy is to ‘boost private sector investment across the whole of the UK’. And it sees Government taking a more strategic role in innovation policy, actively directing innovation towards our most important societal challenges, as critical to achieving that goal.3
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