“I’m worth a million in prizes..” Iggy Pop
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Wow, I really liked this article at the Economist and I wanted to share. It kind of shows how desperate private industry and governments are for really good ideas. And as everyone here knows, I am all about new ideas or ‘building snowmobiles’ and I try to promote that process as much as I can.
But imagine adding incentive to the ‘building snowmobiles’ theme? That is what makes innovation prizes such an interesting and potentially lethal concept for our industry and the war effort. Perhaps I should consider raising prize money for the best construction of a Letter of Marque concept for modern warfare use? How about an innovation prize for low cost, high return warfare ideas? Really open it up to the public, or just offer the contests within the boundaries of an organization. How about an innovation prize for new types of war or business strategies? Or how about for a company logo? To really put it out there, how about using mobile cash as a means to reward locals as a means of gaining ideas for COIN and reconstruction in Afghanistan?
Companies could also offer innovation prizes to those who can come up with the best cost saving ideas, or to new directions in business? There are many complex problems a company could try to solve by putting it out there for their employees to solve through a prize system. It is just one more way to create that unique situation that would allow for your employees to create something important to the company or ‘people will support what they help to create’.
Now the one thing that is most valuable and truly the prize, is business success or victory in war. A company would be smart to not only offer prizes for innovations, but to reward their company as a whole by increasing salaries because they are more profitable. Or offer the benefit in one way or another, which would reward your employees for participating in this innovation prize concept in the first place.
The articles below indicate that this is a major theme throughout the world, and it sounds like most of the experts agree that it works. For companies reading this, InnoCentive is the company that the Economist identified as a platform for innovation prizes. Or you could just start your our prize initiatives. If the US government is jumping all over this stuff with their Challenge.gov site, then our industry could probably stand to benefit from it as well. I would even post it here on the blog if it was open to the industry and public?
As for the problem solvers out there, there are plenty of prizes to go after if you have some big ideas. Thousands of dollars are available and it sounds like these prizes are only increasing in size and number. Just check out the chart below. –Matt
Challenge.gov looking for great ideas
For Corporations (from InnoCentive website)
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Offering a cash prize to encourage innovation is all the rage. Sometimes it works rather well
Aug 5th 2010
A CURIOUS cabal gathered recently in a converted warehouse in San Francisco for a private conference. Among them were some of the world’s leading experts in fields ranging from astrophysics and nanotechnology to health and energy. Also attending were entrepreneurs and captains of industry, including Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, and Ratan Tata, the head of India’s Tata Group. They were brought together to dream up more challenges for the X Prize Foundation, a charitable group which rewards innovation with cash. On July 29th a new challenge was announced: a $1.4m prize for anyone who can come up with a faster way to clean oil spills from the ocean.
The foundation began with the Ansari X Prize: $10m to the first private-sector group able to fly a reusable spacecraft 100km (62 miles) into space twice within two weeks. It was won in 2004 by a team led by Burt Rutan, a pioneering aerospace engineer, and Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft. Other prizes have followed, including the $10m Progressive Automotive X Prize, for green cars that are capable of achieving at least 100mpg, or its equivalent. Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur who runs the foundation, says he has become convinced that “focused and talented teams in pursuit of a prize and acclaim can change the world.”
This might sound like hyperbole, but other charities, including the Gates Foundation, have been sufficiently impressed to start offering their own prizes. An industry is now growing up around them, with some firms using InnoCentive, an online middleman, to offer prizes to eager problem-solvers. Now governments are becoming keen too. As a result, there is a surge in incentive prizes (see chart).
Lost at sea
Such prizes are not new. The Longitude Prize was set up by the British government in 1714 as a reward for reliable ways for mariners to determine longitude. And in 1795 Napoleon offered a prize to preserve food for his army, which led to the canned food of today. In more recent times incentive prizes have fallen out of favour. Instead, prizes tend to be awarded for past accomplishments—often a long time after the event. As T.S. Eliot remarked after receiving his Nobel prize, it was like getting “a ticket to one’s own funeral”.
Incentive prizes do spur innovation. A study led by Liam Brunt of the Norwegian School of Economics scrutinised agricultural inventions in 19th-century Britain and found a link between prizes and subsequent patents. The Royal Agricultural Society awarded nearly 2,000 prizes from 1839 to 1939, some worth £1m ($1.6m) in today’s money. The study found that not only were prize-winners more likely to receive and renew patents, but that even losing contestants sought patents for more than 13,000 inventions.
Today’s prizes appear to have a similar effect. The Ansari X Prize, for example, has attracted over $100m in investment into the (previously non-existent) private-sector space industry. The technology used by the winning spaceship is now employed by Virgin Galactic to develop a commercial space-travel service, and many of the losing contestants have formed companies in the burgeoning sector.
The important thing about a well-designed prize, argues Dr Diamandis, is its power to “change what people believe to be possible”. Indeed, they open up innovation. A study co-authored by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School reviewed scores of problems solved on InnoCentive and found that people from outside the scientific or industry discipline in question were more likely to solve a challenge.
Prizes also help form new alliances. Netflix, an American company that rents films, offered a $1m prize to anyone that could do a better job than its own experts in improving the algorithms it uses in online recommendations. It was stunned to receive entries from over 55,000 people in 186 countries. The seven members of the winning team, who collaborated online, met physically for the first time when they picked up the prize in 2009.
Inspired by such successes, governments are now offering prizes. Britain, Canada, Italy, Russia and Norway, in co-operation with the Gates Foundation, are funding the Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) to develop vaccines for neglected diseases in the developing world. The AMC is offering $1.5 billion to drugs firms that can deliver low-priced vaccines for pneumococcal disease, a big killer of children. GlaxoSmithKline plans to deliver such vaccines to Africa next year.
Alpheus Bingham, a co-founder of InnoCentive, says government agencies, ranging from America’s space agency, NASA, to the city of Chicago, now use his company’s platform to offer prizes. There is even a bill in the American Congress that would grant every federal agency the authority to issue prizes.
Is this a good thing? Prizes used to promote a policy are vulnerable to political jiggery pokery, argues Lee Davis of the Copenhagen Business School. Thomas Kalil, a science adviser to Barack Obama, acknowledges the pitfalls but insists that incentive prizes offered by governments can work if well crafted. Indeed, he argues that the very process of thinking critically about a prize’s objectives sharpens up the bureaucracy’s approach to big problems.
One success was NASA’s Lunar Lander prize, which was more cost-effective than the traditional procurement process, says Robert Braun, NASA’s chief technologist. Another example is the agency’s recent prize for the design of a new astronaut’s glove: the winner was not an aerospace firm but an unemployed engineer who has gone on to form a new company.
When the objective is a technological breakthrough, clearly-defined prizes should work well. But there may be limits. Tachi Yamada of the Gates Foundation is a big believer in giving incentive prizes, but gives warning that it can take 15 years or more to bring a new drug to market, and that even AMC’s carrot of $1.5 billion for new vaccines may not be a big enough incentive. No prize could match the $20 billion or so a new blockbuster drug can earn in its lifetime. So, in some cases, says Dr Yamada, “market success is the real prize.”
Story here.
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Challenge.gov looking for great ideas
By Lisa Daniel
Sep 09, 2010
The Defense Department is putting some of its most vexing challenges on the Internet for the public to help solve as part of a new initiative to invite creative solutions to government problems.Pentagon officials submitted four challenges to the Challenge.gov website that launched Sept. 7. The site, a White House initiative administered by the General Services Administration, offers millions of dollars in prizes to those who find solutions to challenges that span all areas of government, from improving health and public schools to advancing science, technology and the environment.The administration’s chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, announced the launch at the 2010 Gov 2.0 Summit. Speaking alongside the administration’s chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, Chopra said the site is an example of the administration’s efforts to close the technology gap between the public and private sectors, bring the two together to solve the nation’s problems, and reward innovation.“We wanted an organizational model to take all the components we describe to engage the American people in problem solving,” Chopra said.Part of the reason for the technology gap, Chopra said, is that the private sector has moved forward with open-architecture Internet models, while the government has remained closed. Challenge.gov is designed for long-term success because of its “grassroots, bottom-up” architecture for inviting public input, he said.Posted Defense Department challenges include:n A challenge from the Office of Naval Research, with more than $1 million in prizes, for white papers that solve problems in one of seven areas: enhanced perception systems for autonomous ground navigation, compressive sensing for urban warfare, flow noise mitigation by fish, chlorine-resistant sea water, reverse-osmosis membranes, measurement technology for high-noise assessments, and directed energy in maritime environments. Papers must be submitted by Nov. 10.n A challenge from the Air Force, in partnership with the Defense Department’s Cyber Crime Center, to pioneer new investigative tools, techniques and methodologies. Fifteen prizes will be awarded. The deadline is Nov. 2.n A challenge from the Army Research Lab to create innovative and interactive solutions in virtual environments, with a focus on artificial intelligence. Entries must be submitted by Dec. 6, and prizes total $25,000.n The Defense Department’s Technical Information Center offers a challenge for papers to be submitted by Feb. 7 to support the center’s customer needs with the use of Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies, delivering technical information to mobile devices and experimenting with tool suites.Other challenges among more than three dozen posted Sept. 7 include:n A NASA challenge to build an aircraft that can fly 200 miles in less than two hours using the energy equivalent of less than a gallon of gasoline per occupant. The team with the best combination of efficiency and speed will win $1.5 million.n An Agriculture Department challenge, as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, to create healthy — and tasty — new recipes for school lunches. Winners in various categories will share $12,000 in prizes.n The Education Department and National Education Association Foundation are challenging public school educators to identify their most pressing classroom problem, and propose a solution. More than $67,000 in prizes is available.The Challenge.gov site offers details for responding to challenges, and challenges can be searched by topic or department.
Story here.
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For Corporations (from InnoCentive website)
To keep pace with the ever-changing competitive landscape, an organization needs to do a better job of tapping into the creativity and talents of people within the company and others across the globe. The more minds working on a problem, the better the chance a great resolution will be found.At InnoCentive we understand that there is no one approach that is right for every business.
Engage The World In Solving Your Problems
Since no firm can afford to hire all the best people, you can access our Global Solver Network, an army of hundreds of thousands of individuals ready to generate great ideas for your business.
Get All Your Employees Involved
We engage everyone in your company by helping to build an open culture of innovation. Employees are motivated and encouraged to think beyond their job description in search of an elusive solution to a problem needed for the company to get better and stronger. We can also help you reformulate and escalate any unsolved Challenges to the InnoCentive Challenges marketplace.
How We Do It
InnoCentive offers a comprehensive suite of products you can choose from.
The Future of Innovation
If you’re going to compete, you need new ways of thinking and addressing challenges that face your business. That means innovation.
New Ways of Thinking
The horse and buggy industry didn’t die because automobiles came along. It died because it didn’t figure out how to adapt to the new marketplace.
Relying on the same old approach to innovation—closed, in-house and often fragmented—can make an organization less nimble and able to respond to change. You need more problem-solving contributors. But you can’t afford to identify and hire all those people.
Open Innovation
So, it’s imperative that you establish a parallel innovation universe in which you seek solutions inside and outside your company. That’s Open Innovation. And that’s where the future lies.
There’s plenty of research that shows that “crowdsourced” innovation often leads to better solutions. The trick is establishing a way of engaging as many minds as possible so that the process can be repeated, predicted and sustained.
Solutions are everywhere
We have the expertise to help you find them.
Website here.