Slashdot Mirror
Expect a Flood of Competitions As US Tries To Spur Public Inventions
coondoggie writes "When it comes to stirring the brains of genius, a good competition can bring forward some really great ideas. That's the driving notion behind myriad public competitions, or challenges, as they are often labeled, that will take place in the near future sponsored by the U.S. government. The competitions are increasing by design as part of the $45 billion America Competes Act renewed by Congress last year that gave every federal department and agency the authority to conduct prize competitions, according to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy."
How much of that will actually be used for competitions?
Is the government going to indemnify me if my invention happens to violate one of the fifty gazillion patents that are already out there?
Let's a have a competition competition! The best competition gets funding, and the rest get ignored or picked up by private groups.
They're not public if they're funded by private industry or controlled by an educational institution. Just sayin'.
I imagine a lot of note-taking at these things.
If the US government wants to spur innovation and competition, it needs to fix the broken patent system. To see how bad the problem is, one need look no further than the morass of patent litigation that has beset the cell phone industry.
You start patenting the ideas NOW. Just as the competition is announced. But you make them ambiguous enough that they can fit almost anything.
And don't forget to also patent the same thing with "on a computer" added.
Patent infringement lawsuits because the patent system is so out of control and most new items "invented" will violate 1 or more patents that should have never been issued.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
... they are having competitions to see who can steal the ideas from our competitions first!
This kind of thing is a scam. Hold a contest for ideas, pay for only the best idea, and then you can use any of the losing ideas you want for free. It's not a "contest", it's an end run around labor laws.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Expect innovation to dwindle until such time as a garage-shop inventor doesn't need to worry about getting sued for patent infringement.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
AMERICA COMPETES! ...until the fucking lawyers show up with fists full of bullshit patents. This is an enormous waste of money, at least until we fix our shitty, ridiculous patent system.
The problem with competitions is that they tend to produce solutions optimized to win the competition - and that may or may not be a solution that's actually useful to solve the real-world problems the competition is notionally aimed at.
We want to stir the brains of geniuses! But don't you dare learn about evolution in school!
Darpa has had the Shredder document challenge (http://archive.darpa.mil/shredderchallenge/) , Nasa has had a roboic spheres challenge (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/jan/HQ_12-029_SPHERES_Challenge_Winner.html)
Darpa has been having the autonomous vehicle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge)
The Navy the underwater autonomous vehicle comp. (http://www.sdnews.com/view/full_story/302685/article-Navy-readies-to-host-autonomous-underwater-vehicle-competition)
it seems that these competitions have already been started, there is a track record for this producing results. I worked on the shredder challenge, I found it fun and had a good time creating what I did. It is a good way to focus many people on solutions.
But you are right, the patent/copyright laws are out of whack and are now an impediment to progress, which means an impediment to profit in general just not in specific. The patent time line should go back to 35 years or so.
40 years stripping funding from public education,
passing asinine laws like "teach the controversy"
raising tuition costs at public universities
outsourcing technical jobs to the phillipines and china
only to hold a "public competition" to see who among those left standing from academia can invent something bold, new, and amazing which will then be targeted for acquisition by one of americas officially approved, sanctioned tech companies (google, apple, microsoft, pick one it doesnt matter) and if there is any resistance to this process, it will be obliterated through patent litigation or lobbied to death until no one has it. At which time megacorp will proclaim a new and bold innovation that sounds strikingly familiar.
america doesnt want innovation because it has the power to displace monopolistic plutocracies. another fact of the matter is that health insurance, dental, vision, 401k, retirement, and all the cool things about being an employee are really fucking expensive. companies would rather not hire 50 people to come up with a new invention, especially during a recession that some of these companies were directly complicit in creating. just take a few grand for your efforts and give us the goods, they say. on the government level its also why DARPA hosts most of these things. Keep working on fun new robots but for god sake dont question the economic or foreign policy that relegated you to joining a damn competition so you can afford dental work.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Mod down? Are slashdot readers seriously that stupid that they don't understand this is just meant to be a replacement for a poor education system? What a sad day when we can't even realize our own stupidity!
to unveil my steam-powered flying confabulomobile to the grand public.
2012 in South Korea? Algae noodles? What!?!
Can anyone participate?
- - Zhang Wei
Have gnu, will travel.
Having led the Shredder challenge for all of a week or so (the teams killed me :), I can attest that the cash prize offered was (for me) an incredible incentive to come up with a solution. Offering direct prizes for innovative solutions to specific, limited, problems is a great idea and one that can help foster a spirit of inventiveness. Patents are a non-issue unless you plan on commercializing a solution, and if that is the case, you (or the government) could license what is needed.
Take even a cursory look at the inventions produced (and commercialized) by citizens of the United States, and you quickly realize that we created most of the things used in the modern world. It is exactly that spirit of inventiveness that the government should be encouraging to help create new jobs, and a challenge program is a direct and productive way to go about it.
Anybody that presents their inventions should be warned that some corporation will be allowed to use it, and you will likely end up with nothing. Corporations immune to civil action will simply claim it as their's.
One huge issue is that the inventor is the last person to get paid when their invention goes big. And the pay isn't enough. Now it seems being dumb enough to have a great invention and taking it to a company for marketing and sales is a nice invitition to buy the Board a round of yachts while you make .00002 cents on the dollar for contributing nothing but the idea to this fine product.
The whole free market economy is already supposed to be a 'competition'.
1.) You come up with a new, cool solution to a problem.
2.) Sell it or start a business around it.
3.) "Win" your monetary prize
The fact that they need to sponsor a sub-system within the existing system just demonstrates that the parent system is broken. Many reasons already mentioned....
1.) broken patents
2.) too much govt regulation
3.) too much existing corporate power (yes you can have 2 & 3 at ths same time!)
What's the point of making something new? If you're successful you'll just get sued for patent infringement when some company that's never produced anything (or whose business is in decline) matches up an overly broad patent on a trivial concept with your new development.
It seems to me that competitions really focus the currently existing players in a field for publicity purposes. The solutions for contests are often already feasible, but the unclear rewards and the risk of failure deter the investment levels required for the attempts. Somehow the prize money tips the scale and forces the existing player to take on more risk (often even out of proportion to the reward). Maybe that's not particuarly useful to advance technology leading up to the prize, but it does help with investment in the field which is the fuel for developing the technology for the future (and often what the prize aims for).
For example, the Orteig Prize inspired the Lindbergh flight and although the Lindbergh flight was arguably over-optimized for the contest, the prize was just enough to motivate the current big players, but not enough to fund the endeavor itself. I seem to remember, that the planes of the day that had the capability to do the transatlantic crossing were ~$50K, but the prize was only ~$25K. Most of the attempts to win this prize were quite conventional (nobody built a new plane), so any tech that was used were certainly applicable to the real-world problems the competion was aimed at. The fact that Lindbergh won this prize is often just attributed to his huberis than any skill or planning on his part (basically, he flew solo on a single engine plane w/o a radio, even though the competions rules allowed for multiple pilots, multi-engined planes and radio and instruments). He took the most risk and won, but it was certainly in the reach of nearly all the competitors. After the contest, there was a surge in investement in aviation based companies which no-doubt fueled research in solving even more "real-world" problems.
The X-prize is another interesting data point. The leading contender and winner (scaled composites) really had the capability and plan to do this, it was a matter of time and focus (the original plan, if you believe Paul Allen, was to piggy-back on the contest publicity, but not actually attempt to win, until the insurance policy guaranteeing money showed up). Even non-participants (e.g., SpaceX) probably had the capability (but declined to compete to focus on more commercial issues) saw that they had to step up in their game to keep from being percieved as falling behind another company in the space business. The x-prize (like the orteig prize) also fueled investment in space access companies (Virgin Galactic, Bigalow Aerospace, Blue-origin, etc) and highlighted some alternate technologies that may or may-not be picked up by more viable companies in the future.
On the other hand, the more sceptical among us might envision this scenario instead...
1. Have some money to invest...
2. Find someone doing something cool in an obscure speculative field...
3. Invest in their company, and encourage the development of a prize in that field...
4. ??? someone wins the prize
5. Profit when investment starts pouring into that previously obscure speculative field.
I have a startup that is bootstrapping itself as we speak. It is difficult. Banks won't lend to you. VCs want to exploit you. Access to funds is non-existent. One of the ways that the government claims to help startups is with the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. They are exceptionally restrictive and prone to cronyism at worst, and extreme risk aversion at best. Solyndra in particular has exacerbated the latter.
Bureaucrats are about the world's least able people to evaluate business ideas or technological innovation. Bureaucrats are the diametric opposite of the risk-takers that entrepreneurs are. They are the last people who ought to be sitting in judgement on the merits of innovative ideas.
So, holding competitions to award prize money to great ideas sounds like an excellent proposition in theory, but in practice it gets sucked down into the mire of why our country is failing badly: the wrong people are in charge.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Yet another way for the government to get work done for nothing. They pay a trifle and get hordes of people working. Who sponsors the work of all those who do not win this lottery?