During the Discovery Challenge, we invited innovative thinkers from across industry, academia and civil society to propose new cross-sector Smart Data use case ideas that could make a difference for consumers, small businesses and wider society.
In return, they joined an emerging community of organisations seeking to drive Smart Data forward, and helped shape the £600,000 Smart Data challenge prize which launched in January 2025, and inform the development of the UK’s future Smart Data economy.
Between 26 October and 8 December 2023 we ran an open call for cross-sector Smart Data ideas. The most promising ideas were then selected by a panel and further defined with the help of experts. The Discovery Challenge culminated in a hybrid event on Thursday 21 March 2024, during which the most promising ideas were pitched to an audience of industry experts.
The four teams with the best ideas were then named as the winners, and each given a prize of £5,000. They were:
We were looking for cross-sector use case ideas that used data from at least one of the following five sectors:
In addition, use case ideas might have used other sources of publicly held or open data, or data that might be unlocked from other sectors, such as telecoms.
