Ninety-six research teams across Ireland are seeking solutions to some of the most significant challenges facing society today. The research is being funded by the National Challenge Fund (NCF), a €65 million programme intended to support academic researchers based in Ireland to work with societal stakeholders to address globally relevant national challenges in the areas of green transition and digital transformation.
The fund was established under the Government’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), funded by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, and is co-ordinated and administered by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).
The concept of challenge funding is nothing new and dates back to the very beginnings of formal academic research. Archimedes came upon his famous principle in response to a challenge from the local tyrant, King Hiero, to establish if his crown was made of pure gold or something less valuable. Roll on a couple of millenniums and we owe the ability to preserve food in jars and tins to a challenge to French inventors set by Napoleon.
“It is a very interesting approach,” says Dr Stephen O’Driscoll, National Challenge Fund manager at SFI. “Broadly speaking, it is used when a problem is reasonably well understood but there is no real idea of what the solution might look like.”
The basic idea is that you put up a cash prize or other inducement for researchers to find a solution to a particular problem, but you don’t tell them how you want them to go about it. “You are setting the direction of the research while leaving enough space for innovation to happen,” O’Driscoll explains. “You need to give the researchers the space to be creative and bring new perspectives.”
In the case of the NCF, the research teams are competing for prizes of between €1 million and €2 million which they will use to bring their solution to market or make it available to society. They have to go through a multi-stage process first though, starting with the initial application.
“There are eight challenge streams, five of them aligned to the green transition and the other three aligned to digital transformation,” O’Driscoll says. “We launch a challenge stream and put out a call for funding applications with an outline of the nature of the problem and of our expectations of research teams. All applications for SFI funding are internationally peer reviewed. This allows us to access global expertise to assist us in shortlisting the teams.”
The teams selected then go on to a four-part process consisting of the concept, seed, grow and prize phases. “During the concept phase, the teams engage with stakeholders to get a deeper understanding of the problem they are trying to solve and to ensure the solution is sustainable and meaningful for the people it is aimed at,” O’Driscoll explains. “During the seed phase the teams start to think about proofs of concept and prototyping. We then select the most competitive teams to move on to the grow phase where they develop the concept further.”
After that it’s on to the overall prize phase where the winning teams bring their solutions to the world.
To progress from one phase to another in a challenge, researchers need to conduct specific activities to a high level during the phase which are then reviewed by an independent international panel of experts.
It is not simply a question of leaving teams to get on with it once they have been selected to participate. Extensive training is provided to help researchers develop skills in areas like theory of change, design thinking, entrepreneurship and communications. Researchers also benefit through extensive mentoring from experienced practitioners in these areas and from members of SFI’s challenge research team.
The programme reached an important milestone with the first set of teams progressing to the grow phase of the 2050 and Future Digital challenges. The 2050 Challenge seeks solutions to current and future challenges in Ireland becoming climate neutral and resilient by 2050 while Future Digital looks at the creation and application of disruptive digital technologies that will contribute to Ireland’s national recovery and resilience.
It is expected that finalists for the NCF’s next four challenges – A Healthy Environment for All, Digital for Resilience, Energy Innovation and OurTech Challenges – will be selected towards the end of this year and for the final two challenges – Sustainable Communities and Future Food Systems – early in 2024. It is anticipated that the programme will conclude in 2027.
O’Driscoll points out that SFI has accumulated quite a bit of experience with challenge funding in recent years and this has seen the development of a variety of innovative solutions including the use of drones to assist in fighting forest fires and the deployment of new technologies to help dairy farms achieve carbon neutrality.
“We have seen some really promising results and tangible impacts from the funding we provide on behalf of the taxpayers and the Government,” he says. “We expect to see similar results and impacts from the NCF over the next few years.”