//The Innovation Challenge Prize

//Introduction

Today, communities face wicked challenges, whether related to infrastructure, climate, or growing citizen demands. Coping requires the constant search for efficiencies, effective leadership and community engagement. The ability to balance interests, find alignment on strategic outcomes and get initiatives well understood by all stakeholders often presents the next wave of challenges. We do not have the luxury of time or resources to waste. We need radical and effective ways of meeting these current and emerging challenges.

At Challenge Ventures, we are finding practical ways to unlock collaboration, develop new partnerships, and harness the energy and potential of collaborative action to tackle wicked challenges. Our goal is to unlock the potential of those people working on the front line of innovative solutions  interested in advancing solutions to our infrastructure, sustainability and efficiency challenges in the private and public sectors.

The Challenge Prize, a tool for stimulating, supporting and testing innovation, particularly amongst diverse groups of people focused on a complex challenge. Trends in crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and open innovation have struck a chord with funders, policymakers and innovators looking for new ways to generate ideas from community based innovation.

Through our experience designing innovation programs for the natural resource, cleantech, telecommunications, and medtech sectors, we have found that a challenge prize with distinct stages for competitors can inspire communities to develop imaginative, effective solutions to wicked challenges. The rediscovery of these tools used at the dawn of our Industrial Age are being revived because they are more effective and efficient in producing results.

The Challenge Prize reward the achievement of measurable outcomes through a financial prize fund. A Challenge Prize has a very open set of criteria and rewards the achievement of targeted outcomes. It fosters a supportive process for less experienced groups of innovators interested in responding to the challenge with their solutions. The challenges address infrastructure, sustainability and smart city efficiency impacts.

The prizes are designed around an 18-24 month timeframe to engage innovators through five phases. We seek to broadly engage groups using a given community or communities as test platforms for the proposed solutions.

Challenge Ventures believes there is a lot of potential for a wide use of challenge prizes and the principles behind them. We don't believe we have all the answers, or that the approach we are promoting is the only option. We do seek partnerships, sponsors, advisors to make sure that the opportunity represented by a Prize is as positive and significant as it might be.

Challenge Ventures is actively seeking partners to launch a Challenges. If you are interested in joining our Innovation Challenge Lab or discussing being a sponsor or test community, please contact us.