But even Love, perhaps the biggest booster of prizes, acknowledges that they're not a cure-all for the discovery doldrums. As Tim Harford, an economist and the author of The Logic of Life, points out, even a $100 zillion prize wouldn't buy you the next Internet -- it's just too disruptive a concept. "To specify what the prize was looking for, you'd have to go a long way toward inventing the Internet already," Harford notes. For all their vogue, these pageants can't replace patents, grants, and R&D.
And despite high-profile bids such as Richard Branson's $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge to solve climate change, planetwide bake-offs aren't as well suited to being solved by prizes. The hardest parts of the green revolution are scaling existing technologies and changing business and individual behavior rather than finding a brand-new silver bullet. The same goes for two new X Prizes under development -- one to improve education and the other to address poverty. And the Buckminster Fuller Institute is supposed to award $100,000 this month for an innovation in any field, at any stage of development, that has "significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the earth's ecological integrity." Hey, good luck with that.
Although prizes can't save the planet, they might help find the next billion-dollar business. Plus, let's face it: They're fun. "Some people are in it for the money," Lakhani says, "but others just enjoy the problem-solving process." EBay's Lewis agrees, "There's no downside. Everyone is a winner just for having built something."
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Recent Comments | 15 Total
April 21, 2008 at 1:00pm by Syamant Sandhir
The purpose of most competitions is to get "the great idea". So the winner of the prize generally has a great idea .
How an organisation takes the idea and converts it into a winning solution is still something most have not worked out.
April 22, 2008 at 8:39am by Jody Powers
This is a concept that can be adopted by many corporations, perhaps in modified format but concept yes. This is and will be a future trend in business that has yet to be tapped.
I would hope, if not already, there are some serious Social and Environmental driven "prizes" that will fork over some serious cash.
May 20, 2008 at 11:54am by Jeremy Preston
A few weeks ago I stumbled across the website http://www.bigcarrot.com that has a really intersting premise along these same lines. The site allows anyone to start a prize on any topic and then invites the public to contribute to the prize's endowment. It looks like things might be off to a slow start over there, but they did host a successful prize to create an open-source alternative for Apple's .Mac.
September 5, 2008 at 10:50pm by Derrick Duckworth
I think contests and prizes are great, so much that i even started my own website about it here!
http://www.votervirus.com
October 1, 2009 at 11:37am by Pat Jewett
We are using a similar approach inside our business to try to reduce overhead costs. Employees can submit ideas to save costs, making them eligible for a slew of really great prizes. We have fielded great ideas for reducing the costs of health care and Dental insurance, and even our International travel insurance for example. The ideas have been very creative and some so easy and obvious we wonder why we hadn't though of them before. Incentive prizes indeed pay off over time.