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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.
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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.
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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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 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.
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.
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.
Until it all gets published, researchers guard their data/results like a dragon guards its gold.
There are very few fields that I'm aware of where that is not the normal behavior.
As for Flemming, didn't he have a nice practice going on the side? Something about treating syphilis?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"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.