Smart Data Discovery Challenge (United Kingdom)

Deadline: 08 December 2023

The Department for Business & Trade, Challenge Works, the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Smart Data Foundry are calling on individuals, innovators, entrepreneurs, academia and civil society to join in identifying innovative ways in which Smart Data could make a difference for consumers, small businesses and wider society.

In this Discovery Challenge (October 2023 to March 2024) they are specifically looking for the most promising cross-sector Smart Data use case ideas.

Smart Data is the collective term for technologies and policies that will enable consumers and small businesses to securely share the data that organisations hold on them with other organisations they trust, so that these can provide them with innovative services.

Smart Data is already a reality in the UK for bank current accounts, in the form of Open Banking. In the future, it could expand into a range of other consumer sectors, including energy, retail and transport, as well as other financial services such as savings and investments, mortgages, and insurance.

New ways of mobilising data will create opportunities to empower consumers, unlock innovation and sustainably grow the economy.

Benefits

By submitting your Smart Data use case idea (or ideas) in the Discovery Challenge open call, they are offering you the opportunity to:
- Help shape the future of Smart Data scheme development in the UK
- Help shape the focus of a potential Smart Data challenge prize which they aim to launch after the Discovery Challenge later in 2024, in which participants will benefit from a share of up to £750,000 and access to a bespoke data sandbox
- Join an emerging community of organisations with a shared interest in, and exciting ideas for, Smart Data
- Make connections with relevant experts and receive their mentorship for your cross-sector use case idea
- Win a reward from a prize pot worth up to £20,000, with individual prizes up to £5,000 each, at the March 2024 Smart Data community event

Eligibility Criteria

Any UK-based individual (or group of individuals) or UK registered incorporated entity (or group of entities) is eligible to submit one or more cross-sector Smart Data use case ideas in the open call.
Please note that financial awards made at the March Smart Data community event cannot be paid to individuals. Individuals will need to nominate a UK registered incorporated entity to receive any financial awards resulting from this event.
Eligibility criteria for cross-sector Smart Data use case ideas
- To be eligible, the Smart Data use case idea (or ideas) that you submit in the open call must meet the following criteria:
  - Your use case idea must rely on using Smart Data. This means a situation where:
    - Customer data is held by a business (or businesses) – the “data holder” (e.g. a bank or energy supplier)
    - That data is shared with an authorised third party, at the customer’s request
    - Using that data, the authorised third party provides some useful service to the customer.
  - Your use case idea must use data held by data holders from one or more of the following five sectors:
    - Financial services
    - Energy
    - Retail
    - Transport
    - Home buying
    - In addition, your use case idea might use other sources of publicly held or open data, or data that might be unlocked from other sectors, such as telecoms.
  - Your use case idea must be cross-sector, meaning that it must use consumer data held by data holders from more than one sector.
    - A number of the five wider sectors listed above include different sub-sectors. They consider use cases that span different sub-sectors to be cross-sector use cases. So the following would count as examples of cross-sector use cases:
      - A use case that uses banking data, and retail purchasing data (different wider sectors – financial services and retail)
      - A use case that uses banking and insurance data (different sub-sectors in the wider financial services sector)
      - A use case that uses mortgage, and surveying data (different sub-sectors in the wider home buying sector)
  - They are also interested in use case ideas that (in addition to using consumer data) use other kinds of contextual or business data to enhance the service to the consumer, e.g. prices of tariffs, services, or products, but this is not an eligibility requirement.