Chicago – In May 2023, The University of Chicago launched the Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA), a novel initiative aimed at accelerating efforts to address major global challenges – specifically climate change, biosecurity, and pandemic preparedness – by leveraging the power of incentives, competition, and private sector innovation.
In its first month, MSA launched its 2023 Innovation Challenge, designed to identify areas where a “pull mechanism” would help spur innovation in biosecurity, pandemic preparedness, and climate change. In other words, the call was designed to elicit opportunities where aligning market forces and generating consumer demand could incentivize private sector investment.
“The threats of climate change and the next pandemic are very real, and we need the tools to tackle both in order to save lives and prevent economic fallout,” said Rachel Glennerster, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Chicago and one of three MSA faculty directors. “Experts and practitioners from around the globe have ideas for new innovations, but may lack the funding and know-how to take their ideas to market and produce them at sufficient scale to have impact. This is why we’ve launched the MSA Innovation Challenge.”
Phase I of the inaugural 2023 Innovation Challenge, launched spring 2023, held an open call for ideas. The submission template asked applicants to identify a market failure where the social value exceeds private incentives and where we know the measurable outcome we want to encourage (e.g., the development of a vaccine, capturing carbon out of the air, etc.).
As a result of proactive outreach across disciplines and around the globe, MSA received 186 applications to the open call for ideas. To identify the Phase I winners, submissions went through three rounds of review and were evaluated by at least six separate referees from the MSA team and external area experts. MSA identified 39 winning teams from 16 different countries. Each will receive the $4,000 prize for their top-quality submission and become eligible for much larger prizes available in subsequent phases along the way toward the ultimate prize, having the idea rolled out as a fully-funded program. The list of winning teams and a description of their submissions can be found here.
The winning applications offered mechanisms for tackling a range of issues, from carbon removal to green industries and methane emissions, to early pandemic detection and antimicrobial resistance.
“The Innovation Challenge forced our team to pin down the exact causes of the market failures we’re trying to solve,” said Aman Patel, Executive Director of Technologies for Pandemic Defense. “While writing our submissions to the Open Call for Ideas, we also had to become acquainted with the full landscape of organizations tackling those market failures from different angles. We’ve come out of Phase I with a stronger sense of the problems we’re dealing with, where the headwinds and tailwinds are, and who our potential allies might be.”
“Methane emissions and GHGs are a huge contributor to climate change and we have been studying seaweed technologies and nature-based solutions as a potential catalyst to remediate this problem,” said Dina Gazayerli , CEO of Al Dawara. “The MSA open call for ideas Challenge has really contributed to advancing our knowledge and understanding of how these solutions can have a potential to shape markets. Magnifying the push and pull mechanisms for this project has really helped us in turning our steps into strides, and filled much needed gaps in our idea.”
A subset of ideas from Phase I will be selected for advancement to Phase II (the “Accelerator”), where they will receive financial support, technical advice from domain specialists, and expertise from the world’s leading market shaping scholars to help fine tune the idea. Over several months, teams will produce more detailed pull mechanism designs. At the end of Phase II, up to $1.5 million in aggregate prizes will be awarded.
“Unaided, commercial markets generate tremendous progress. How much more progress can be achieved by guiding markets beyond the limits of commercial plausibility toward the frontier of technological possibility?” said Christopher Snyder, the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor in Economics at Dartmouth College and an MSA faculty director. “We need to create important incentives, like the MSA Innovation Challenge, to encourage and support new breakthroughs that will have huge impacts on society, and broad spillover effects that lead to even more discovery.”
For more information on the MSA Innovation Challenge, contact MSA Director Leah Rosenzweig at [email protected].
###
About the Market Shaping Accelerator
The University of Chicago’s Market Shaping Accelerator aims to harness the momentum and interest in these tools generated from global successes in vaccine development to accelerate their adoption by governments, multilateral institutions, and philanthropies to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
Supported by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative of Eric and Wendy Schmidt, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin, and the Digital Harbor Foundation, the MSA brings together renowned experts in market shaping, including Nobel laureate economist Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster from The University of Chicago and Christopher Snyder from Dartmouth College.
