Crowding in UK Progress

Our experience winning an Emergent Ventures grant to run the TxP Progress Prize

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Mar 20, 2024

2.5 years ago we launched TxP, a community bringing together emerging talent in tech and policy – the two most important levers for shaping the future. 10 months later, we wrote Reviving Progress in the UK: a call for progressives to adopt a positive, optimistic view of science and technology in the face of the UK’s entrenched economic stagnation.

Now, after winning a grant from Emergent Ventures, we’ve just wrapped up the £5000 TxP Progress Prize: our attempt to identify and promote those with the ideas and energy to end Britain’s malaise. What have we learned?

This is a recap to document:

How (not) to get support for your side project
Our reflections on the entries
What worked well / less well
A few parting thoughts

How (not) to get support for your side project

Well before we launched the prize, we had long been admirers of the Emergent Ventures grantmaking program. After running lots of events focused on tech, science and economic progress, we had a ton of ideas for what we wanted to do next. And we hoped our focus on tech, policy, the UK, and emerging talent could be a promising fit for an EV grant.

But when we initially applied, we weren’t successful. Fortunately, Tyler’s feedback was enormously helpful:

First, he asked us why we weren’t working on this full time. On this, we had a good answer: we felt our continued work in VC & tech policy was an asset to building this community and ensuring our work was always informed by the frontier, rather than just an indication of lacking commitment. But then Tyler asked us, twice in a row, ‘what is your signature product?’ Being honest, we realised even if our pitch was strong at a high level, we’d essentially just submitted a laundry list of ideas for what we wanted to deliver, without much focus. We knew we had to go back to the drawing board.

Almost immediately after Tyler told us to come back with something more refined, we knew that the blog prize is what we should hone in on. Although the progress / abundance / supply-side movement was growing, there was still an undersupply of a) ideas and b) talent focused on these issues specifically within a UK, progressive context. With a general election on the horizon, now was the time to plug this gap. A blog/essay prize would provide a platform to encourage new ideas and to identify/elevate the emerging talent to deliver on them.

Before we re-submitted though, we reached out to Civic Future, who shared a focus on talent spotting, and New Statesman Spotlight, who were interested in promoting new policy ideas, to partner on this with us. Thankfully, Tobias Phibbs (Civic Future) and Alona Feber (NS Spotlight) were instrumental in securing their support. Within a week, we could come back to Tyler with both a much tighter pitch and leveraging a strong signal from credible organisations we knew he trusted, and this time Emergent Ventures was happy to fund the project. We don’t know precisely how important the CF/NS partnerships were, but they probably didn’t hurt.

[Side note: ‘If you want money, you can get it over the internet’ is a legit thing that our friends/family outside tech still don’t quite understand.]

Our reflections on the entries

The blog prize was designed to advocate solutions, amplify frontier tech, and offer a clear, tractable proposal. We particularly wanted punchy takes that pulled the debate outside the norm and we encouraged people to publish online to prompt discussion. We also rewarded good writing and pointed to pieces we’d been inspired by.

What did we get in response?

There were ~6 predominant types of entries with different theories of change:

Unlock a dormant national asset and capture the upside somehow, aka. identify ‘compressed springs’ where supply is mismatched to meet demand: e.g. open sourcing data, income sharing agreements & sovereign innovation funds, opening up student loans infra for other issues
Bureaucratic hacks & incentive design: e.g. transport funding via payroll taxes, train timetable tricks, house deposit mechanisms, regulatory insurance, new models for scientific research, spinouts and manufacturing
Frontier tech solutions: e.g. eVTOLS, biotech, geothermal & SMRs, non-invasive neurotech for new religious experiences
Tech diffusion: predictive analytics in food supply chains, bright lighting and neurotech to improve office productivity
Mindset shifts: creative destruction for state institutions, building new cities, encouraging automation & working less
Talent policies: encouraging global genius to come to the UK, bigger populations

We accepted that 1200 words was limiting to both propose an idea and explain how to build the new state capabilities and muscles required to deliver them. But where we were less forgiving is when entries simply dodged the hard part of the question: there were quite a few proposals for new task forces or adding things to the school curriculum, which are not really solutions but ways to implicitly push the hard work [what should the new body actually do to solve the problem?] onto someone else. Some others overestimated the impact of reforming existing institutions or extracting more value from existing economic factors, without really digging into why previous reform attempts had failed. While others were just a tad too unfocused, proposing several ideas without going particularly deep on any one of them.

But across the winners, highly commended pieces, and many other entries, we were delighted with the optimism, energy and ambition that people responded with.

What worked well / less well:

After submitting the original grant application in late July and getting funded in early August [yes, EV makes very fast decisions and it’s incredible], we knew we had to go live a) early and b) quickly. We had no bank account, no website, no brand, no launch event, no prize format, no judging panel, and we had no time: The Bennett Public Policy Prize, a long-running essay competition launched by the University of Cambridge, would be launching in early October. We were launching from scratch and we wanted to go live before them to avoid getting drowned out. It did put the pressure on, but the constraints were motivating and we were excited by the potential to blow an established prize by an established, mainstream institution out of the water.

[Practical tip for anyone in a similar bind in the UK: if you’re not a company and you’re not a charity, getting a bank account isn’t an obvious / easy thing to do. Instead we opened a Lloyd’s Treasurer’s Account for ‘unincorporated associations’. But apply asap because getting it set up took an age, adding to our time issues. Unfortunately Monzo/Revolut wasn’t an option.]

When it came to assembling a judging panel, we’d been able to build a fairly decent network through TxP/jobs over the last few years, but we were still being a little ambitious. Thankfully, we asked 6 judges and all 6 said yes – we owe them a lot for volunteering their time, credibility, and expertise to help make this happen:

Kanishka Narayan (Labour PPC for Vale of Glamorgan, former tech investor & government adviser)
Sarah Hunter (Non-Executive Director of ARIA, former Global Director of Public Policy for Google X and former New Labour DCMS SpAd)
Richard Jones (Materials Physics Professor and VP for Regional Innovation, University of Manchester)
Sam Freedman (Senior Fellow, Institute for Government, Substack writer, and Education adviser to Ark and formerly the Department for Education)
Alona Ferber (Senior Editor, New Statesman Spotlight)
Munira Mirza (CEO, Civic Future, former Director of the No 10 Policy Unit)

It was also another example of laddering up support: without Civic Future & New Statesman Spotlight, we might not have got the EV funding. Without the funding and the ability to say ‘this is happening, do you want to be part of it?’, we definitely wouldn’t have got such a stellar judging panel. (Andrew sees quite a bit of this in VC, but it was fun being on the other side of the table.)

We were also surprised by some of the judges’ views when it came to finalising the winners. They all felt it was a strong shortlist, but we didn’t expect some of the individual judges’ preferences. To respect their (volunteered) time, we had also promised to share no more than 5-10 pieces to review. In the end we shared 11, with 4-5 others only just missing the cut. It raises questions about whether we should’ve included them, or cut down much more? Whose taste did we want to weight towards: our own, or the judges?

Finally, a few thoughts on what worked less well or what we might change next time:

We ended up getting almost 100 entries, but until the week before we only had about a dozen. We’d set the deadline to early January to give people the Christmas break, but in practice this meant we only had a trickle of submissions for about 3 months before a flood right at the deadline. This created a good buzz around the cut-off point, but didn’t quite generate the drumbeat of online writing we’d hoped to achieve.
In a similar vein, we’d asked entrants to mention TxP in their tweets / blog posts to promote the prize and encourage more entries, but because most people submitted at the end it didn’t make a huge difference. That said, it did help create some momentum around the finale.
One of the prize’s aims was to identify & promote emerging talent. And we were pleased to see the winners reflect the breadth of the TxP network, coming from a wide range of different career backgrounds at the forefront of science and tech progress, including biotech, data science, VC, public policy, journalism, consulting, and even university. We’ve had political advisers get in touch and we hope some entrants will go on to make their ideas a reality — something we’ll be supporting via the UKDayOne project. But we could’ve done better to engage a wider range of talent: The 'progress' scene does tend to be predominantly male-centric (one of many reasons that the aesthetics of ‘progress’ are increasingly a bit off, tbh). At TxP, we have consistently acknowledged and taken proactive measures to address this imbalance. Every event, and the judging panel for this prize, has showcased remarkable speakers who represent a wide range of ethnic and gender backgrounds as much as they also bring phenomenal insight and technical/non-technical expertise across tech and policy. We also ensure that only 50% of tickets are allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis and retain control over the remaining spaces. Yet we hit upon this issue with the prize, with only 22% of entries (including joint submissions) coming from women. We don’t have all the answers here, but it’s something we’d want to improve on if we ran the prize again.
There were minor logistical challenges, too. When we announced, we also wanted to contact every entrant individually to thank them, even if they hadn’t won, rather than simply let them work it out. But despite being painstaking about how to sequence the announcements and promote the winners properly — there were lots of different bundles of prizes — we still got questions when we announced the showcase event, with people clarifying the results before we’d had a chance to contact them.We probably could have just announced the shortlist as an interim step, and then at least everyone wasn’t in the dark.
Finally, when a couple of entrants asked if we’d run the prize again, we said it depended on sponsorship/funding. But when we asked ‘what’s the minimum prize money you’d need to enter?’, they surprised us by answering that ‘most of the value is actually in the platform/profile-raising and network/community’. If this is representative (a big if!), it implies either we could’ve run the prize for money or we could’ve funded our own time properly. [For context, ~90% of the EV grant went on costs (prize money, new brand, expenses, etc.) and we split the small remainder.]

A few parting thoughts

We’re proud to have run this prize. As we said in our New Statesman launch op-ed: “It is all too easy for concern about decline to morph into self-fulfilling prophecy…We must not let a declinist narrative snuff out any space for optimism, ambition and agency.” We wanted to push back on this mindset & manifest more optimistic thinking that proposed answers not just problems. On that basis, we think the TxP Progress Prize has been successful, and is proof that if you want something to exist in the world — a platform, a particular energy, a call to action — you can make it happen yourself.

But we also don’t yet know if we’ll do it again. Throughout this project and the last few years of TxP, we’ve had immense support from Emergent Ventures, Civic Future, New Statesman Spotlight, Ben Greenstone at Taso/Milltown, and lots of venues across London to help put on events. But a good chunk of why TxP has grown is because there is huge freedom and potential in a) keeping things free for people to attend and b) organising them voluntarily. We haven’t compromised on our independence or ideas by diluting it with sponcon. And we haven’t raised barriers to entry (or people’s expectations…) by charging attendees. It’s almost entirely surplus! It’s just that it has also required a lot of our time, too :)

Unfortunately, the UK has not yet escaped stagnation. But, despite running TxP in our spare time, we’re pleased to be part of the UK’s growing idea machine for progress alongside organisations we hugely admire. And now, we’ll work with the likes of UKDayOne to ensure as many of the TxP Progress Prize submissions can be turned into implementation-ready proposals asap.

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