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In 1714, Britain's Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering a cash prize of up to £20,000, worth well over £2 million today, to anyone who could solve a problem that had defeated Galileo and Isaac Newton: how to measure longitude accurately at sea. Tris Dyson, Founder and Executive Director of Challenge Works, runs an organisation built on that same core idea, using big incentive competitions to accelerate breakthroughs in fields ranging from space exploration and agri-tech to urban innovation. But as Tris explains, a modern challenge prize is rarely just about the money: getting the incentives right can mean building in access to data, accelerated regulatory pathways, and new partnerships alongside any financial reward.
One of the problems Challenge Works is currently taking on is also deeply personal for Tris. Three and a half years ago, he was diagnosed with ALS and told he had three to five years to live. In this episode, he joins Alberto Lidji to talk about challenge prizes more broadly, and about the prize he's helping build that could change the odds, for himself and for millions of others living with neurodegenerative disease.
Tris explains what it actually takes to design a challenge prize that works, drawing on examples from the original Longitude Prize to today's hunt for solutions to antimicrobial resistance and even extracting drinking water from lunar rock, and what has to be in place, the right target, the right incentives, the right enabling environment, before a single team ever starts competing.
Neural implants are already restoring movement in people with Parkinson's, and showing early promise for memory too. Tris also talks about "brain twins" that could let scientists test new treatments without ever touching a real brain, and why he believes the biggest obstacle standing in the way of curing these diseases isn't the science, but the bureaucracy sitting on top of it. This episode is for anyone who believes in the power of ambitious thinking to drive breakthroughs.
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