The government should have a common online innovation challenge fund platform. This
platform should be used by all departments and teams in government to run and
advertise open innovation/challenge competitions, receive submissions, organise and
retain data on submissions, and it should be straightforward and easily findable by
members of the public.
For the purposes of this proposal, ‘innovation challenge fund’ is defined as any
competitive process whereby the government sets a challenge and multiple applicants
submit proposals with new ideas for solutions. The oldest example of this is the
Longitude prize of 1714 – the government offered rewards for anyone who could devise
a simple system for determining a ship’s longitudinal position at sea. Now, government
runs multiple innovation challenge funds and prize competitions – for ODA funding,
research funding, through the Small Business Research Initiative, through the Industrial
Strategy Grand Challenges and through Innovate UK competitions.
The increasing use of ‘mission-based’ and innovation focused challenge prizes to throw
open public sector challenges to all-comers is a great thing: the more voices involved in
solving a common challenge the better.
But all these competitions – which follow similar processes of explaining a challenge,
soliciting submissions, and awarding funding – use different, disparate and often
privately contracted platforms and websites to manage the submission process.
This is inefficient, locks up data in silos, and keeps interesting and helpful ideas (even
submissions that don’t win innovation competitions and challenge funds can be useful)
saved on platforms and servers belonging to disparate parts of government, or private
sector companies which are not part of government at all.
We are paying repeatedly for the same simple service of running an online innovation
challenge and allowing private companies to keep the most precious resource – data,
ideas and – crucially – information about people with good ideas who are motivated to
help the government.If we had one simple innovation challenge fund platform, hosted on GOV.UK, and
available to any team in government to use to set up and run a challenge fund, then we
would cut costs which go to the private suppliers of innovation challenge sites. This UK
Aid Direct platform, for example, is run by the supplier Mannion Daniels. The closest
thing to a single government platform for this process is the Innovate UK service, which
at least collates all their funding competitions in one place, follows a common process,
and enables people to find multiple opportunities, but some of these still use
email-based applications. This FCDO challenge programme has its own separate
website – which the programme says is being left up so that resources and information
on the projects it funded can still be found. This is a good thing to do – but it shouldn’t be
necessary, because all these innovation funding programmes and information about the
applicants’ ideas and the winners’s progress should be stored on a single platform.
If we had one simple innovation challenge fund platform, it could be easy and simple for
civil service teams to set up an innovation challenge competition or prize. It would avoid
the need to procure a website developer or get a supplier to help run a competition
when we could do this in-house, with the help of the Government Digital Service. This
would encourage the use of more of these types of competitions. More open innovation
funding competitions means diversifying the range of ideas and people who apply for
government funding, reducing the likelihood we rely on the same pool all the time.
If we had one simple innovation challenge fund platform, we could standardise
processes which we are designing bespoke every time we run a challenge/innovation
fund. Applying for funding from the government in an open innovation/challenge
competition should be simple, straightforward and similar every time, so new people
don’t have to trawl through application information and potentially be put off the process,
when we need their good ideas. Competitions/challenge funds could still appear on
different front-end websites – different ‘shopfronts’ can be created from an online
platform with a shared back-end, so different audiences can be catered for, logos used,
and information presented. But these front-end sites could be easily found from a single
directory if they all shared a common back-end platform, enabling potential applicants to
find opportunities easily.
A single government platform with a shared back-end would also enable us to keep
(with the right data retention agreements in place for applicants) information about who
is applying for government innovation funding in one place. This data could be shared
and compared, which would enable us to know more about who applies for these
competitions and who wins. It would improve institutional memory about which ones
departments have run before. We could go back and check old ones to find out whether
the ideas were successful beyond the initial funding phase – something which we arepoor at doing. This would lower the likelihood we fund the same ideas repeatedly, ask
the same questions repeatedly and, potentially, fund the same people repeatedly. This
defeats the purpose of challenge/innovation funding, which is that we open up funding
to multiple people and genuinely new ideas.
In one of my roles in government I was in charge of an innovation challenge fund, which
is now closed. All the good ideas and organisations who submitted have their
information stored on the private server of the supplier we contracted to run the
process, beyond our reach. This isn’t necessary. We could do this process simply,
easily, and as a shared platform in-house. Websites don’t solve policy problems – but if
they’re shared, simple and set up in the right way, they can reduce friction and get out of
the way of us getting the good ideas we badly need from the public.
3071-11