Photo credit: Naja Bertolt Jensen
Challenge prizes harness open innovation and enable the discovery of high-value solutions for a diversity of problems. Over the past few decades this method has gained popularity, and it is essential that we build up a strong evidence base to inform their design. This report sets out to map the barriers to scaling innovation and the opportunities for supporting the scaling process through open competition, providing the basis for developing the future of similar innovation funding models.
This report builds on lessons from the ‘Accelerating Growth’ strand of the recently completed Afri-Plastics Challenge, a challenge prize competition funded by the Government of Canada, and designed and delivered by Challenge Works. The Afri-Plastics Challenge sought to scale innovative approaches to plastic waste management across Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on empowering women and girls.
We find that challenge prizes can play a unique and catalytic role in social enterprise scaling. By employing a wide array of strategic levers, they directly and indirectly tackle organisational, institutional and infrastructural barriers to scale, supporting a diverse group of innovators to grow their solutions. To unlock their full impact and support system-level transformation, open competitions, like this, should be fully integrated within the broader innovation support ecosystem.
Download the full report now.
