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The Role of Prizes In Innovation
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel assesses the impact on innovation of the increasing number of prizes, such as the X Prize, that reward solvers of intractable problems. From the column: 'Prizes prompt a lot of effort, far more than any sponsor could devote itself, but they generally pay only for success. That's "an important piece of shifting risk from inside the walls of the company and moving it out to the solver community," says Jill Panetta, InnoCentive's chief scientific officer. Competitors for the $10 million prize for the space vehicle spent 10 times that amount trying to win it. Contests also are a mechanism to tap scientific knowledge that's widely dispersed geographically, and not always in obvious places. Since posting its algorithm bounty in October, Netflix has drawn 15,000 entrants from 126 countries. The leading team is from Budapest University of Technology and Economics.'"
The fact is that any team capable of solving these problems is worth MUCH more than any prize offered. Offering a prize is pointless IMO - it's like giving a surgeon a $20 bill every he saves a life.
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
If innovators work on a project alone, they have to work really hard to get people to pay attention to their work. If there is a contest at which the organizers are already taking care of the publicity, they have a better chance at turning their work onto better opportunities. All they have to do is make a good showing at the contest.
I'll give $100 to the moderators that mod this comment up in some sort of innovative way (+5 Offtopic perhaps?)
"The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel assesses the impact on innovation of the increasing number of prizes, such as the X Prize, that reward solvers of intractable problems. From the column: 'Prizes prompt a lot of effort, far more than any sponsor could devote itself, but they generally pay only for success."
Wow! We should apply this to the movie/music industry.
Especially, where universities are concerned, the bragging rights to a well advertised prize can be worth more than the prize itself. Competition also make a great muse.
We are all just people.
Prizes may be of some use. But on the other side of the equation exists the fact that if the prize offered outweighs the social benefit. Besides having an increase in depressed people. More seriously, you have wasted resources and time/energy of everyone who didn't win the prize. Those resources could have been channeled elsewhere or into other useful things.
.. where a prize is offered to accomplish an impossible task .. resulting in complete waste of resources.
Also, circling is the vulture of impossibility
I am not saying prizes are bad etc. I am saying prizes aren't necessarily a panacea.
Copernicus never got a prize. His accompishments were just too large to be recognizable. Prizes, especially those mentioned with fixed goals are a lot of fun, but can the truely innovative be discerned in time to reward the inovator? Only sometimes I think.s -selling-solar.html
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Go Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The fundamental idea is so wrong it's just hard to know where to begin. It's related to the trivialization of scientific endeavor and the focus on publicity as more important than reality.
The days of the solitary inventor who could justify spending months or years pursuing a breakthrough and feel some sort of financial justification because of the expectation of winning a prize are long behind us. There might be some 'low-hanging fruit' still to be found, but not much of it, and if you knew where it was, it would make much more sense to just pick it rather than to offer a prize in hopes of motivating some gold seeker to find it. Major scientific breakthroughs now require serious investments, usually involve large numbers of people and long periods of time, and any profits are far downstream. You *NEED* to have that long-term perspective, not the motivation of a quick fix for a prize. Even the prize seekers admit they just want the publicity to help sell their results.
By the way, I actually work with researchers from a major lab. Some of them are even leaders in their fields, and have established track records of changing the world for the better far more than I ever will. Some of them have won prestigious awards and prizes, and I'm sure they'll win more in the future. However, it is very clear that they aren't motivated by prizes, and if they were, I'd take odds against them ever accomplishing much of anything.
Prizes are interesting for 'gold-hunting' pseudo-scientists, not for the actual hard working *REAL* scientists.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
- The desire to expand your knowledge and skill.
- A personal interest in the completion of the project at hand.
- The need for recognition.
- Something to put on your resume.
Have corporations found a way to utilize this motivation in projects other than software? What role does the cash prize play in this if people are spending many times fold in attempting to win the spoils?The X Prise had more to do with stoking an incipient avenue of development than anything as narrow as looking for an immediate solution. It shows that whatever it is can be done, or done better. There's publicity for the contestants, yes, but also for the contest. In cases where a company puts up the money, I'm sure that the prime functions are to create buzz for its industry (as well as the company's place in it) and as a method to identify hireable talent.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
"No, officer, I was not patronizing a prostitue, I was merely offering this young lady an XXX prize."
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Just wanted to point out a slight flaw in your idealistic view of science and academia. We'd all LIKE it to be that way, but perhaps you've heard of one other prize that motivates some of the most brilliant scientists in the world in many fields? People spend their whole careers trying to get this prize, not just for the money but for the validation. Say what you will, but very few scientists have shrugged off the Nobel Prize as the goal of "gold-hunting pseudo-scientists".
Finally, in theoretical computer science and mathematics, it IS still possible for one person or a very small group to come up with a breakthrough. The Poincare conjecture was recently solved largely due to the efforts of a single mathematician. There are other examples, but TCS/math are not as vastly invested in massive research groups as say, particle physics.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
FYI, I did RTFA .. I know the article itself said prizes aren't a panacea. But I was clarifying the reasoning .. which wasn't clear in the article.
"The Space Race" was most definitely a contest.
We are all just people.
Unfortunately, many if not most of the oldest and most successful research facilities are now mired in political and bureaucratic sludge. Research funding and even hiring too often is now driven by political motivations. I am glad that these prizes provide an opportunity and motivation to restore the joy (and hopefully progress) in research.
More publicity.
Offering seemingly large prizes means:
1) More media attention.
2) More people interested in competing.
Indirectly, it helps make the science and funding for further research more popular. Simple, ain't it?
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and whi
More recently, Dr. Bussard gave a talk at Google HQ about his currently favorite fusion technology and it has caused some commotion.
It's profoundly disturbing that the US is willing to spend a trillion dollars on war in the middle east getting negative results and not willing to devote even one tenth of one percent of that to fusion energy prize legislation that pays for positive results only.
Seastead this.
A prize is simply a way to leverage more effort from more people to solve your problem. Look at the Darpa Grand Challenge:- winning-the-darpa-grand-challenge/
u ld-go-nuclear/
http://thinkorthwim.com/2006/11/19/robotic-racing
They could have spent $2 million dollars funding each team, which is the way they'd approached funding in the past. Instead they spent $2 million for ALL the teams efforts, and it worked. What a spectacular bargain.
Prizes are perfect if you have a specific goal that's almost achievable, but you need to get a bunch of young innovative folks excited about it. In general, prizes are appropriate for engineering problems, not for fundamental science. Here's something else I wrote about why Google should use a prize to fund fusion. On the face of it, that sounds stupid, but I think it makes a lot sense if you think about it:
http://thinkorthwim.com/2006/11/22/why-google-sho
My other sig is funny.
Science is full of contests (you already mention awards and prizes, for example). They get instant recognition at least in their field for being the first to discover an important idea or discovery. Contests are a way to demonstrate to the whole world that something is important rather than the few dozen people who have some interest directly in your work. $10 million for the first fully privately funded organization to put someone into space in a reusable vehicle. That's a big statement about the importance of doing that activity.
Instead, you complain that "pseudo-scientists" get the prize while the real scientists keep working hard, toiling in the shadows. I guess a world where the importance of science and of course, society's connection to reality just isn't that important. Where real science needs to be trimmed so the tots can have their astrology charts read or whatever. At some point, that's what's going to happen when the relevance of science to society and reality goes away. At least, a monetary prize attaches something real to that scientific progress and generates broader awareness about what's going on. Go ahead and push the myth of the selfless toiling scientist. Just don't be surprised when society fails to take that science seriously as a result.That's true, but I don't think a Nobel Prize is the reason the winners did what they did. It is just a pat on the back. I think where prizes are really effective is when they are very large, when there is a specific goal stated up front, and that goal can be reached in a relatively short period of time by a small number of people doing something a little innovative. The VC firm, Kliner Perkins, announced that they will be awarding an alternative energy prize with a $100,000 award every year to someone that did something remarkable. That doesn't spur any innovation. That's just a publicity stunt. The Nobel Prize isn't as uninspiring as that, but its similar. I think its a nice recognition, but not a motivator.
My other sig is funny.
When I was in college I had a professor who doubted that prizes in science bring about any new inventions or discoveries that wouldn't have been made anyway. He argued that progress in science usually comes about through cooperation, not competition, and that the most significant advances in science were all made by people with little of no financial incentive (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Flemming, etc.)
The article doesn't say whether the Ph.D. crystallographer who solved the pathology problem won a prize, but I wonder if a prize would have made a difference.
So where are the prizes in the fields of computer science/mathematics/computational sciences? [links] (goatse me if you'd like)
Our grad students mustn't have the cash money to pay for their thesiseses.
"The Poincare conjecture was recently solved largely due to the efforts of a single mathematician. "
How ironic, then, that he utterly shuns publicity and declined the Fields Medal. Something other than prizes motivates Perelman.
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Maybe I've missed it, but I cannot recall a single example of any winner of *ANY* Nobel Prize, not just the science categories, who ever claimed that winning a Nobel Prize was part of their motivation. In fact, I even believe that the committee would count it against any nominee who said so. Do you care to provide *ANY* example of your claim?
I repeat. Real science is *NOT* a contest.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
So where was the prize? Or are you simply trying to reinforce my point? I shudder to suggest that you should read the actual article...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Especially in a field like computer science, prizes are very good because they give researchers motivation to work with the same data set as everybody else. It is much easier to compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of algorithms and approaches when people work towards the same goal.
And there are other reasons for very *REAL* scientists to try to win prizes. Winning prizes gains prestige for their institution, and prestige for their institution helps provide the resources they need (students, grants) to do research.
It would be great if the world was as perfect and idealistic as it appears through your eyes.
Not releasing products & changing the world.
The point about Perelman was to illustrate that breakthroughs can indeed come from a single person in math/TCS. I understanding not reading the article, but not reading even the comments?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Not even remotely. The word on the street is that SpaceShip One cost around $20 million - and Scaled Composites was the only entry that was fully funded. The remaining entries had essentially no funding.
It's also worth pointing out that historically, technology prizes tend to be won by point solutions - rather than the general purpose solution desired. The City of St. Louis , for example, was a specially built aircraft that was essentially an evolutionary dead end. The Thompson Trophy was supposed to encourage technology development for fighter aircraft - but didn't. SpaceShip One has the same problem - it's a point solution that scales poorly.
Do you have a problem with irony? His point was perfectly lucid and I appreciated the reminder.
Two Things:
One, it seems almost exploitative, to fund innovation this way.
Two, it seems like a sizeable population of idle rich is necessary, to find a pool of investors sufficient to fund innovation this way.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The Nobel Prize includes a princely sum of money, actually.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
While I can't provide the evidence you ask for, there are a LARGE number of examples of scientists pulling underhanded stunts to appropriate enough credit to look good for a prize committee, or hell even a grant committee. You'd be naive to think otherwise. These aren't "bad" scientists -- their work is often excellent and advantageous to the field at large. It's just that their motivation, or social methods, might be less than pure. Have you read Watson's "The Double Helix"? He comes across as quite a bastard, and he wrote the book himself. The bottom line is that scientists -- good or bad -- are humans, and suffer from the same shortcomings that everyone else does, and that includes the need to be recognized sometimes.
This isn't offered as hard evidence, but read Carl Djerassi's book "Cantor's Dilemma" sometime for a plausible look at science (he's the biochemist who invented the birth control pill, also writes fiction on the side).
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
I never said the prize motivated Perelman. Thus the poster's comment was an implied rebuttal to my own. While his statement was ironic (as it claimed to be) -- and I have no problem with irony and even agree with his statement -- it was as a whole based on the premise that I had implied Perelman "did it for the prize".
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
It worked for the DARPA Grand Challenge, but not in the way most people think.
The prize was the carrot. But there was a stick, too. The Grand Challenge was a real threat to robotics funding at CMU and Stanford, which had been getting DARPA money for decades but were progressing very slowly. Originally, neither university's robotics group intended to enter. But there were apparently hints that if the non-university entries did significantly better than the people DARPA had been funding, the funding for the big robotics labs would be in jeopardy.
At Stanford, the management of the AI Lab had to be replaced to get real results. That was done, and things picked up quite a bit. There was a significant breakthrough in robotic vision for the Stanford vehicle. That was the real payoff in all this.
The CMU vehicles were what someone above called a "point solution" - the searchlight-sized gyro-stabilized gimbal with a line scanning LIDAR was a technological dead end.
"I repeat. Real science is *NOT* a contest
I disagree. Pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, food companies, are all using science and scientific experiments in a contest to make their product better than their competitors. Even scientists that work at Universities are always competing against one another. They compete for funding, resources, and in different universities, to see who can find a solution first.
Prizes are only interesting if you're already working on it before the prize, and know you're gonna win already. For everyone else involved, it's just a PR stunt and a way to do really really cheap R&D.
If you're smart enough to win one of these prizes, don't be a dumbass - go file the patents and sell them the solution for 100x more!
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I haven't RTFA, or even TFAS, but this reminds me of why waste is important.
For example, the article presumably says that prizes are good. The concentration of money into one person's (or one body's) bank account so that it could be spent on stuff like this, could be considered "waste" (particularly when it's spent on really stupid shit).
Another example is how governments keep trying to reduce "inefficiencies" and programs that don't have proven results. The problem is, if you want to get one successful program, you probably had to go through two or three which weren't successful (and therefore are "wasteful"). Any entrepreneur knows that this is really "risk", and not "waste", but conservative governments these days...
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
If someone will work for the pay on offer, can you really say it is too cheap?
If you find a (good) surgeon willing to save your life for $20, would you decline?
Too me, this seems a very interesting alternative to patents. It certainly seems like the economic incentive is enough to drive innovation quite spectacularly. Of course, participating in one of these contests also give you (or your team) good PR. So if this kind of contest ever became common-place it would probably be necessary to up the prize sums somewhat.
I quote myself from yesterday about the benefits of contests:
Ignore this sig
The targeting aspect of prizes is geared to the short term not the long term. The danger to the long term research is that prizes may achieve headline-making successes, and, as a result, clueless politicians and CEOs/CFOs may be inclined believe this is the best R&D funding model, because it allows them to parade short-term results in front of voters or share holders. This could lead to dumping or reducing funding to corporate R&D labs or universities, where what is currently 'blue sky' research may well lead to major breakthroughs 20 years down the road. Prizes are a good supplement to existing research funding and may produce quicker solutions to some vexing problems, but it would be disastrous in the long term if most funding were delivered this way.
Half Word - Will Double, Wire Palindrome, San Francisco
Remember that before the winner is chosen, every contestant is in the same boat. They're aware that they might lose. They knew this before they entered the contest. Hopefully, especially with big projects that cost a lot of money, they take this risk into account when they decide to enter the contest. Businesses who bid for projects must to evaluate this risk and deal with it to be successful. The company I work at bids for government (US Military) projects occasionally. Sometimes we don't get the project. It's part of the risk of doing business. The reason why it's an effective model is that individual companies can choose to take on the risk. It's the best way to allocate resources.
Here are the things I think we need a prize for. Each one is something that we scan get fairly quick advancements in, but appears just out of reach.
Cheap Silicon production (for solar power)
Better battery: 1. by weight and 2. by volume
Better Voice recognition software
Electronic voting machine with paper trail, prize awarded for the one hardest to break into.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The simple irony of Perelman's nature in light of the conversation does not invalidate your point about individual genius. I was pointing it out as an interesting tangent, not a rebuttal.
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