Before and beyond solutions: how the Canadian Government’s Impact and Innovation Unit is using challenge prizes to communicate and advance broader policy objectives.
In 2017, the Canadian Government took bold and concerted strides to accelerate the use of innovative approaches to improve outcomes on issues that citizens care about, when it established the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU). Situated within a central agency – the Privy Council Office – we were asked to experiment with new program delivery models and assess whether they help close the gap between policy development and implementation.
Under the auspices of Impact Canada (a part of the IIU), the principal approaches we use are challenge prizes, pay-for-success funding models, and behavioural insights. Since launching in 2017, Impact Canada has experienced rapid growth, with over $720 million of funding under its program authorities and a significant portfolio of behavioural insights projects. To read more about what we do and how we do it, please have a look at our annual report.
My name is Julie Greene, and I have the privilege of being a member of the Centre of Expertise for Impact Canada.
Challenge Works has been an integral partner for our team, guiding and supporting our efforts in co-designing challenge prizes with some of Impact Canada’s first clients.
In this blog, I want to reflect on something important we have learned while scoping, designing, launching and assessing challenge prizes over the last two years
When thinking about why a program or department might want to run a Challenge, we usually consider some of the following factors:
- Because there is an unknown solution to a known problem;
- To support and accelerate change in an issue area;
- To attract new innovators to the issue and;
- To build new markets or innovations developed as a result of challenges.
Those are often are our opening considerations when investigating a problem area that we might address or advance through a challenge prize.
As we have worked with multiple departments to launch Challenges that address issues of key importance to Canadians – creating smarter cities and clean technologies, improving Indigenous housing and responding to the opioid crisis – we are learning that when each partner decides to spend the extensive time and energy it can require to define and launch a well-researched and designed challenge, they have considered what might be accomplished beyond the solutions the Challenge may surface.
At the outset of planning, and until first stage assessment, the possible solutions that a Challenge may offer are unknown. We have defined, to the best of our ability, or (as we have heard Challenge Works’ Olivier Usher say many times), (insert Scottish brogue here) “we are reasonably certain”, that we understand the problem, current approaches, barriers to success and that a gap or opportunity exists that can be helped using a challenge prize. But we have no idea at that time what will actually happen when the Challenge is launched! So, as they consider the rationale for undertaking a Challenge, there are broader policy objectives that our partners want to express or explore through launching a prize.