Needed: Prize For Best Use Of Prizes To Spur Innovation
from the everybody-wins dept
Using prizes to spur innovation continues to gain in popularity. Two new contests, one to promote fuel efficiency and another to develop a new lunar lander, are in the works from the X-Prize Foundation, which previously had sponsored a contest for private space travel. The model is intriguing because it promotes competition, while spreading the R&D costs among several different organizations, each with a lot at stake. However, the use of prizes is not without its detractors. Some point out that there's already a prize called profit for people who develop technology. That's sometimes true, but there's often a disconnect between the ability to innovate and the ability to execute and turn a profit; perhaps if these inventors can be rewarded with monetary prizes, there will be no need for the patent-and-sue strategy. A deeper problem may be the fact that technology often develops in completely unexpected ways, creating its own demand. Economists know this as Say's Law. The most impressive innovations probably won't come from the heads of contest organizers, but from researchers pursuing their own interests. Still, as long as there's going to be research driven by the public interest (sponsored by governments and other non-profit interests), having researchers compete is a promising model.
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Overlooking one other thing
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Should winners be killed?
be decapitated with kite lines, scrabble players could be asphyxiated with scrabble pieces, bridge players could be lying dead in the cardinal directions, stamp collectors could have their faces glued on to albums, fishermen could be gutted, paintballers could be shot with real guns, yachters could have their skin flapping in the wind, chess players could be blown up with time-bomb chess clocks, Techdirt readers... er, we won't go there. ;P
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Paying for Prizes
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Re: Paying for Prizes
We're in agreement that the government funds all kinds of wasteful projects (some are research, some are just pure pork). But as long as the government is going to be involved in directing research at all (the wisdom of which can be debated), it seems like a good thing that it's moving more towards the prize model, as opposed to the grants model.
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Re: Re: Paying for Prizes
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Between the stools
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