Posted on 01/26/2007 10:55:05 AM PST by anymouse
The U.S. and other modern capitalist economies rely on a handful of approaches to stimulate innovation.
Big corporate research-and-development shops invest shareholders' money in the search for future profit. Small entrepreneurial start-ups do the same with venture capital.
Academics toil in big universities, sometimes for profit, sometimes for glory. Open-source software wizards mend and tend shared software that no one owns, the high-tech equivalent of a barn-raising. Government steps in where private money fears to tread.
Now, a proliferation of prizes is attracting bright minds to stubborn problems.
InnoCentive, a company spun off six years ago by drug maker Eli Lilly, charges clients ("seekers") to broadcast scientific problems on a Web site where scientists ("solvers") are offered cash -- usually less than $100,000 -- for solutions; more than 50 challenges are now pending (see the site). Netflix, the mail-order movie company, is offering $1 million for an algorithm that does 10% better than its current system for predicting whether a customer will enjoy a movie, based on how much he or she liked or disliked other movies (visit the contest site).
(snip)
But prizes work in ways that conventional R&D doesn't, and finding ways to spur innovation is crucial to improving how well we -- and our children and grandchildren -- live.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Prize ping
If you pay for results, you get results.
If you pay for research, that's all you'll get. Endless research.
Nice find! It will be interesting to see how much money gets proposed for various agencies' new prizes programs once the new budget proposal comes out in a matter of days.
NASA, DARPA, and possibly now the DOE...which had an H Prize proposal that nearly became a reality as this thread documents:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1754825/posts
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