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A Strong Challenge Statement Brings Innovators to Your Prize/Challenge

Kristalyn Laryea, Senior Advisor, Partnerships and Programs
Alana Couvrette, Policy Advisor

Impact Canada, Impact & Innovation Unit, Privy Council Office

In less than two sentences, a challenge statement has the potential to make — or break — a prize/challenge. Read on to learn more about these small, but mighty, elements of prize/challenge design.

A challenge statement is a prize/challenge’s call to action. It provides a clear, concise goal for participants and helps them to understand the aims and terms of the prize/challenge.

In general, a challenge statement includes the objective of the prize/challenge (the what) and the criteria that will be used to assess if the objective has been met (the how). For example, the challenge statement for the ANSARI XPrize was “…to build a reliable, reusable, privately-financed, manned spaceship capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers about the Earth’s surface twice within two weeks.”

The challenge statement may also include the prize amount and/or the population or group who will benefit from addressing the problem, such as the example of the challenge statement for Nesta’s Longitude Prize:

“The Longitude Prize is a £10m prize fund that will reward a competitor that can develop a point-of-care diagnostic test that will conserve antibiotics for future generations and revolutionize the delivery of global healthcare. The test must be accurate rapid, affordable and easy to use anywhere in the world.”

The challenge statement lays the groundwork for the overall process; thus, developing an effective call to action requires having an idea of the prize/challenge details. This could mean that the challenge statement is not finalized until closer to the end of the design process. There are benefits to developing a draft challenge statement in the early stages, however, because it can help to focus ideas, identify assumptions, and build buy-in for the approach. Use the work that you did to define your problem to build a solid first draft and then modify it as you progress through the prize/challenge design process.

As you work to develop your challenge statement, here are some points to keep in mind:

Provide a clear goal. State the objective of the prize/challenge and include the criteria that will be used to judge the winners. Present the information so that participants can understand what is being asked for and what they need to do to respond.
Try not to leave it open-ended. Ambiguity is the enemy — it can result in submissions that are unrelated to the goal of the prize/challenge or discourage participants from entering their solutions due to a lack of understanding the issue. Remember: a well-defined problem is easier to solve.
Be inspiring. Let innovators know how the prize/challenge will have a real impact on an important social, economic or environmental problem. Consider making a statement by using different forms of media (e.g., short video).
Be actionable. Make sure that what you are asking participants to do is, in fact, possible during the timeframe that you give them. In addition, make sure that the prize(s) that are being offered are sufficient to incent innovators to act.
Avoid being prescriptive. While you should include all of the critical information about the parameters of the prize/challenge, avoid being too prescriptive or you may limit innovation. Provide only the basic requirements to give participants room to innovate beyond what is asked for in the challenge statement.
Engage with stakeholders. Engage with your colleagues and other experts and stakeholders to test and strengthen the challenge statement. As much as possible, tap into different types of expertise and perspectives. Ensure that you consult with individuals or groups who have lived experience with the problem of interest to ensure that what you are doing is relevant to them.
Don’t take it lightly. The quality of your challenge statement impacts the success of your prize/challenge. It is the main way that it is communicated to the world. It’s how you get buy-in from stakeholders and support from partners. A strong challenge statement is how you attract the right innovators to submit their best ideas to address the problem that you are trying to solve. Do not take it lightly!

Resources and tools to help you develop challenge statements are available online. For examples of challenge statements, take a look at the prizes/challenges offered by Nesta or those on challenges.gov. And, as always, don’t hesitate to contact us in the Privy Council Office’s Impact and Innovation Unit, if you have any questions or need any help.

References

Doblin (2014). “The Craft of Incentive Prize Design. Lessons from the Public Sector”, Deloitte University Press.
McKinsey (2009). “And the Winner Is…Capturing the Promise of Philanthropic Prizes”, McKinsey & Company.
Nesta (2014). “Challenge Prizes. A Practice Guide”, Nesta Centre for Challenge Prizes.
Skytland, Nicolas (2016). “Making a Statement: When it Comes to Hackathons, a Compelling Challenge Statement Is Key to Success”, DigitalGov.
Tessman, Trae (2017). “Crafting an Actionable and Targeted Idea Challenge Statement”, Ideawake.

Published: 2018-12-12
Last modified: 2025-05-23

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Working with the Canadian Government on Challenge Prizes

Tris Dyson, Executive Director Centre for Challenge Prizes, Nesta

Impact Canada, Impact & Innovation Unit, Privy Council Office

parliament building clocks from UK and Canada

Finding innovative solutions to today’s complex environmental and social challenges requires diverse skills and creative thinking. Gone are the days of the lone inventor hitting on a solution — today’s challenges require collaboration, bringing together people with different skills to try and solve problems in different ways. And often, the usual suspects aren’t the only ones with good ideas.

Over recent years challenge prizes have seen a renaissance as tools for innovation.

Challenge prizes pose a specific question and offer a financial reward to anyone who can solve it the fastest. Not only do they draw in more innovators from wider fields, but they come up with better solutions.

Prizes aren’t a new idea. The Longitude Prize, launched in 1714 was aimed at finding a solution to accurately measure longitude at sea. John Harrison created a portable clock that did just this, and won over £23,000 — because knowing the time is the key to accurately navigating by the stars. But just as importantly, a range of other inventors won smaller prizes from the Board of Longitude. The Longitude Prize didn’t insist that the solution had to be a clock — and so among the winners were wildly different approaches to the problem, from new astronomical methods to improved designs for the sextant.

The radical openness of the original Longitude Prize — almost complete agnosticism about what the solution should look like — is remarkably well suited to the way innovation works today.

In 2014, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act, Nesta launched a new Longitude Prize: this time, it is to help solve the alarming rise of drug-resistant infections. Poor use of antibiotics over the past 70 years means they are getting less effective, just as the supply of new antibiotic drugs is slowing: we’re losing the race against the superbugs. And there isn’t much incentive to solve the problem either. Drug companies aren’t incentivised to sell fewer drugs, nor are doctors rewarded for not prescribing them. So the new Longitude Prize is all about creating new diagnostic tests that tell people whether or not they need antibiotics — reducing the widespread misuse that leads to resistance.

But beyond a few key criteria, we’re open to any reasonable way of solving the problem. It could be solved by engineers, doctors or chemists; they might solve it with a machine, a reagent or some smart software. Providing it fulfils our 8 criteria, including cheap and accurate, we don’t mind.

So far, 250 teams in over 40 countries have registered to participate in the prize. And in recognition that not every contestant starts from a level playing field, we’ve handed out over £250,000 in seed funding to promising teams — including one round focused specifically on the impressive, but undercapitalised biotechnology sector in India. This is important. It’s not just a question of being fair; it’s making sure that all the teams who can bring a meaningful contribution are able to take part.

We’ve seen this in a number of our prizes. In the Dynamic Demand Challenge, a prize we ran to help make electricity use more eco-friendly, two of the finalists have gone on to great commercial success: Upside Energy and Powervault both unlocked significant new investments following being shortlisted.

We want to use these prizes to solve problems faster and better — making the most of talent, ideas and motivations out there, wherever they may be.

That’s why we’re excited to be working with the Canadian Government that are now making a concerted and pioneering effort to develop prizes to solve problems faster and better in Canada — ranging from opioid detection technologies, to food security and housing.

The first question though is what are the problems that need open innovation?

Published: 2018-12-12
Last modified: 2025-01-21

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Innovative staffing approaches: Getting to the “Right” trifecta - People, place and time

Julie Greene, Lead, Capacity and Partnerships
Rodney Ghali, Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet

Impact Canada, Impact & Innovation Unit, Privy Council Office

Here in the Impact and Innovation Unit at PCO, our mission is to drive a shift in the way the Government uses new tools to help address complex public policy challenges — and our focus is on the “how”. But as the new Centre of Expertise that supports the Impact Canada Initiative — a whole-of-government effort to help departments accelerate the adoption of outcomes-based funding approaches — we know that the “who” matters just as much. Our team has been cultivated to be multidisciplinary in nature, in order to support a broad range of emerging Government innovations, from social finance to impact measurement and behavioural insights.

We have learned that for an idea to move from vision to execution, it must be created and supported by a team that meets project needs at all stages of design and execution. Never underestimate how hard that can be! On a larger scale, the public service has the same need for a dexterous, nimble and skill-flexible workforce. We are looking to support departments to move toward their experimentation and innovation goals through our Innovative Staffing Resource Management Strategy. We will help to surface and seed talent across the public service, onboarding individuals from outside the government and from within departments/agencies, to build capacity across Departments and Agencies for the practical application of innovative approaches to achieving greater impact.

The IIU’s innovative staffing strategy consists of three streams: Fellowship, wherein subject matter experts join government on a term to lead priority projects in their field of expertise (e.g. behavioural insights or innovative finance); Affiliates, comprised of a roster of renowned leaders who can provide ad hoc advice and guidance on project execution and broader strategic issues in their fields of expertise and; Policy and Program Entrepreneurs.

In our role as Secretariat to the Deputy Minister Task Force on Public Sector Innovation, we are moving from vision to action with the Policy and Program Entrepreneurs stream of our innovative staffing strategy. The Task Force is focused on realizing the Government’s priorities in policy and program experimentation and innovation, with an emphasis on core systems transformation and disruptive policy solutions. To support this ambitious agenda, Policy and Program Entrepreneurs (PPE’s) will be recruited with an expansive pool of skill sets to support the TF-PSI, and its members, to deliver on priority projects.

PPE’s will be drafted from within Departments and across professional categories to undertake a full-time, one year position supporting their Deputies’ projects through the Task Force. These employees will work collectively with their departments and PCO, and have opportunities for professional and leadership development, access to new networks, as well as coaching and mentoring. We expect that new PPE’s will be in place by February 2018.

Like so many of you, we in the IIU are working to build a public service “dream team” around each of our projects, and are honoured to play a role in supporting other Departments to launch and accelerate innovation by ensuring, (as the boss says) that “the right people are working in the right place at the right time”.

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What Symphony Orchestra Auditions Tell Us About Designing People-Centred Policies

Meera Paleja, fellow in behavioural science

Impact Canada, Impact & Innovation Unit, Privy Council Office

In the 1970s, many major orchestras in the United States introduced a novel approach to auditioning musicians. Rather than having musicians audition in plain sight of the judge, musicians now played from behind a screen so that they could not be seen, only heard. So what happened? It turns out that after these changes were instituted, the proportion of women musicians hired by the top five orchestras in the nation more than tripled. Scholars attributed much of this difference to the change in the auditioning process.

There are three fascinating aspects to these findings: 1) under the old audition system, judges, highly trained musicians themselves, were unable to make an objective evaluation of the music that wasn’t influenced by the gender of the musician; 2) when the screen system was introduced, there was a dramatic increase in the proportion of women hired — showing how simple interventions could reduce massive gender disparities, and; 3) the orchestras were cognizant that these biases could exist, and made the bold move to introduce the screen system. It was a dramatic display of organizations’ willingness to admit that bias may exist and counteract it not through explicit instruction or rules, but rather through a behaviourally informed solution that takes human bias into account when developing a hiring process.

As a Behavioural Insights Fellow at the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) working with Status of Women Canada, I often come back to this example when thinking about how we can create more inclusive policies and programs that benefit all Canadians, and how we can use behavioural science to tackle bigger gender-based “wicked problems” in our society. Awareness campaigns and diversity training have shown limited effectiveness at changing behaviour. This is in part because ingrained biases are not easy to override solely by providing more information to the person whose behaviour we want to change. Behaviour change can be facilitated when we design interventions that account for the fact that people have limited attention, they form quick judgments without evidence, they like to do whatever they see most people doing, and they tend to prefer the status quo, whatever that may be. To tackle problems in diversity and inclusion, we have to account for the fact that human beings exist on the other end of our policy.

To design the best policies and programs we need to think like scientists and question our assumptions. What evidence do we have that this is the best way of carrying out a policy or program? How can we test our assumptions to know what’s working and what’s not working?

One way to figure this out is by leveraging an integral feature of the behavioural science approach-experimentation. When we compare potential “treatment” interventions to a status quo “control” condition on the outcome of interest, we can reach evidence-based conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. This approach may seem novel in the diversity and inclusion space, but in fact, experimental psychologists in academic settings have been using this methodology to study bias and design techniques to counteract it for decades. Government is steadily catching up.

Behavioural insights is increasingly being regarded as a complementary policy tool to tackle complex and wide-ranging problems such as negating hiring and promotion bias, ensuring equal access for both parents to the labour market and childcare, and decreasing gender-based violence. In the policy realm, this work is in its infancy, but I’m excited by what feels like a new dawn — government’s appetite to tackle these issues, and also seek out the highest standard of evidence to do so.

Moving forward with this approach will no doubt have its challenges. Processes, procedures, and mindsets cannot be changed overnight. But I’m confident that with our shared values including a belief in equality as well as our desire for stronger evidence, the use of behavioural insights will help further gender equality. The integration of behavioural insights at Status of Women Canada presents a novel opportunity to make these advances in Canada, and I’m thrilled to be a part of this effort.

A Strong Challenge Statement Brings Innovators to Your Prize/Challenge

References

Working with the Canadian Government on Challenge Prizes

Innovative staffing approaches: Getting to the “Right” trifecta - People, place and time

Measuring impact by design: A guide to methods for impact measurement

Working in Two [Connected] Worlds:

What Symphony Orchestra Auditions Tell Us About Designing People-Centred Policies

Women in Cleantech Challenge selects 10 innovative semi-finalists

Women in Cleantech Challenge