Does Britain need its own Nobel Prize?

A Nesta event on the Labour Party conference fringe made the case for an annual UK innovation prize to match the prestige and ambition of the Nobel – but structured around scientific challenges rather than rewarding historic breakthroughs.

The event built on a proposal published earlier this year by Joe Owen, Nesta’s director of policy and government partnerships, which suggested that the prize fund should be “no more than £20 million per year”, with the competition modelled on the Longitude Prize of 1714. Nesta’s Challenge Works division has run its own Longitude Prize on three occasions since 2014, most recently targeting the use of AI-based approaches related to the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Challenge Works founder Tris Dyson, also on the panel, argued that the government should fund a prize with the scale and ambition of the Nobel, but using a challenge format, to differentiate it from other awards such as the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Queen Elizabeth prize. Panellists were also keen that the new prize would be promoted by the BBC.

Challenge Works describes itself as a “global leader in designing and delivering challenge prizes”. It has been involved in the DSIT/UKRI metascience unit’s novelty indicators challenge, supporting RAND Europe and the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex Business School to develop and validate measures that can automatically identify novelty in research.