{"id":151,"date":"2015-09-24T05:22:55","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T05:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miekevanderbijl.com\/?p=151"},"modified":"2016-01-04T05:45:30","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T05:45:30","slug":"be-careful-what-you-wish-for-innovating-through-challenge-prizes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miekevanderbijl.com\/index.php\/2015\/09\/24\/be-careful-what-you-wish-for-innovating-through-challenge-prizes\/","title":{"rendered":"Be careful what you wish for: innovating through challenge prizes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine you have identified a problem you do not know how to solve, but you do have some money to spend on it. You can then either hire someone to solve the problem for you \u2013 a designer or innovator – or you can organise a challenge in which people compete by generating solutions. The person who can find the best solution wins a prize. The latter is becoming increasingly popular, which is easy to understand. A challenge prize will give you more solutions than commissioning the project to an individual designer or innovator. But how do you make sure that this crowdsourcing results in something innovative and successful? On my recent trip to Europe I discussed this question with three \u2018social innovators\u2019 who each had wide experience in setting challenge prizes. In this blog I argue that the key to a successful outcome is in the framing of the challenge.<\/p>\n

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Prizes are making a comeback in the social innovation sector. For example, federal agencies in the United States open up key policy challenges and problems to the public through the challenge.gov<\/a> website. Prizes range from $200 for a challenge to produce a communication campaign to raise awareness and education about mental health, to $20,000,000 for creative and innovative ideas to develop diagnostic tests that may be used by health care providers to identify bacterial infections.<\/p>\n

When you have a problem that requires an innovative solution there are basically two reasons why you might choose a challenge prize to solve it:<\/p>\n

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  1. You assume that participants know more about the problem than you do and are therefore better able to design the best solution. For example, Chris Sigaloff of social innovation agency Kennisland<\/a>, told me how her agency recently set a challenge<\/a> for the city of Amsterdam about its expected shortage in schools in the near future and the insufficient variety in school offerings. People who submitted proposals for this challenge include teachers, parents, principals and members of school boards, who each have expert knowledge about the \u2018problem space\u2019.<\/li>\n
  2. You assume that participants know more about potential solutions and technologies than you do. Hackathons such as GovHack<\/a> are based on the idea that bringing together people with high programming skills leads to innovation. And the design of the diagnostic test to identify bacterial infections mentioned above obviously requires high levels of technological expertise.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    When I visited NESTA<\/a> I met Marco Zappalorto who explained that in setting the challenge it is important to indicate how the contributions will be assessed and measured. For example, the MPrize<\/a>, set by the Methuselah foundation, challenges research teams to break the world record for the oldest living mouse. The prize is awarded to the research team who are able to develop the best science and technology that supports life extension. The age of the mouse is a clearly measurable outcome.<\/p>\n

    Focussing on measurable outcomes seems fair enough. In a game the rules should be clear, especially when there is a big prize at stake. But this can also lead to problems. NESTA\u2019s \u2018Hands off My Bike Challenge<\/a>\u2019 looked for ways to reduce bike theft. The instructions to participants specified that\u00a0ideas would be\u00a0judged by the amount of time it took to free the bike. The focus on this measurable outcome only led to submissions of new locks. However, there are many other solutions beyond locks that might prevent bike theft such as a better lock, a safer place to park, a different bike, a GPS tracking solution or a community monitoring solution (In Sydney I always park my bike close to taxi stands so the taxi drivers can keep an eye on it).<\/p>\n

    This clearly shows that setting the challenge too narrowly might not lead to useful solutions. This was confirmed by Lars Elmgreen \u2013 now working for MindLab – who in his previous work for a Danish public health innovation organisation had used hackathon-like challenges many times. He mentioned that hackathon challenges should be framed as solution neutral as possible, as a closed challenge prize locks in too much of your own solution:<\/p>\n

    “You need to pose open-ended questions in order to make room for unexpected outcomes and solutions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    For example, when they organised a hackathon<\/a> around “better support for patients with heart failure and their relatives” they framed the challenge around the high levels of stress imposed on the relatives of heart failure patients, as that is one of the essential barriers for a working family life, instead of just focussing on the patient’s perspective. The instructions were accompanied by a video with interviews with a doctor, a nurse, and a patient with their relative, plus information such as statistics and analyses by patient organisations.<\/p>\n

    To be able to understand the design of a productive prize challenge it might be useful to go back to the assumptions about crowdsourcing: collectively the crowd knows either more about the problem space, or the solution space. Both types of knowledge indeed are fundamental to an innovation process. But what lacks here is the expert skill to translate knowledge of the problem into an innovative solution through \u2018framing<\/a>\u2019 the problem: the act of finding a new perspective on a problem. Within a design context framing is often seen as the key creative step that allows an original solution to be produced.<\/p>\n

    For example, when the Designing Out Crime research centre<\/a> was asked to design a \u2018bomb-proof\u2019 rubbish bin for train stations, they found through their design research that what mattered to people was not so much that the bin was \u2018bomb-proof\u2019, but that people felt safe at the station. The main problem was the vast number of false alarms. Through framing the problem as being about \u2018reducing the time to assess terrorist threats\u2019 they were then able to design a rubbish bin<\/a> that was truly innovative. Would such a solution have emerged through a challenge prize? I think that would only have been possible if the challenge was not fixed on the measurable \u2018bomb-proof\u2019outcome, and if framing was integrated at some point in the challenge prize process.<\/p>\n

    To introduce framing to the challenge prize process there are two ways forward:<\/p>\n