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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."
Is the government going to indemnify me if my invention happens to violate one of the fifty gazillion patents that are already out there?
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.
... 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!
you will owe me. I have already filed for the process of taking any currently used activity, process, or action and converting said activity to be in use "on a computer". I have also patented the next step of commiting these actions alone or in combination with other actions on linked devices, both using physical connectivity to a network , or wirelessly. Pay up, bitches!
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.
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.
The rest is reserved for the patent trolls.
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?