The UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has earmarked £2 million ($3 million) to support crowdsourcing approaches to "complex, large-scale scientific problems" within the funding agency's purview.
"In recent years crowd sourcing has been deployed to tackle complex problems and to build research community resources," the BBSRC says in its funding announcement. "Examples have seen crowd sourcing use to re-design a protein, perform microscopic analysis of biomedical samples and even search for molecules that could make cancer treatment candidates."
The agency is seeking research proposals that demonstrate "a large and complex problem that lends itself to a crowdsourced solution and that would be difficult to solve in other ways."
Further details about the program are available here.