Challenges and prize competitions are an innovative and nimble way NIH supports biomedical research, along with broader engagement from the community. They give retrospective rewards for successfully solving a problem or providing a product or solution where NIH has identified a need. Dr. Taylor Gilliland, NIH’s Challenge Manager, stops by this episode of the NIH All About Grants podcast to discuss this open innovation approach. He will explain what prize competitions are, why NIH uses them, their similarities and differences from traditional grants, how to find them on Challenge.gov, who is a “solver,” financial incentives, and much more.
“A challenge can best be described as an open innovation mechanism whereby solutions to problems are crowdsourced from the public, and then the best solutions are awarded a prize. And usually that’s in the form of a cash payment or honorable recognition or other kinds of support. Challenges have… been used for hundreds of years in both public and private sectors to really engage broad audiences, coming up with creative, unanticipated solutions to vexing or challenging problems that an individual organization or in this case, a government agency is facing.”
– Dr. Taylor Gilliland
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