Cricket Reactor Inventor Says $1mil Prize Winners Stole His Work

An anonymous reader writes "A group of Montreal MBA students took home this year's million-dollar Hult Prize, winning a competition for socially innovative business ideas that calls itself 'one of the planet's leading forces for good.' But now the ethics of the winners and the prize committee are being called into question. McGill PhD researcher Jakub Dzamba says that after he supplied the idea and design behind their pitch, products of years of development work, the team reneged on its promises to make him a partner and is instead taking credit for his work. Apparently, Hult knew about the issue before it awarded the prize." Yes, these are the students whose win garnered $1 million awarded by Bill Clinton.

Comments

Philosophy of selfishness = anything goes.

[Joining Yet Again]

It's a necessary consequence of embedding a philosophy of selfishness that people will ultimately bend the rules in their favour.

An MBA school is one of the most optimised breeding grounds for this behaviour.

This is a problem in some academic circles

[Anonymous Coward]

Not giving credit seems to be often "practiced" in some academic circles. I won't say all, because I don't know, but I have seen way to many instances of this, and was also a victim a few times.

Researchers can be roughly divided into two types: creative and non creative. The latter is usually not very intelligent and even the simplest equations or physical phenomena may baffle them. But, they make it up by following the orders of their superiors, brown-nosing, schmoozing and taking credit for other's work. The latter is critical, because they would be unable to do any work by themselves.

Re:This is a problem in some academic circles

[Coeurderoy]

The main issue is that creative people tend to be busy being creative,
wherease non creative people have time for "politics"

And of course there is the problem of some creative people deciding "darn it, lets creativelly fuck'em all"

Re:What did you expect?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

A good MBA will not only screw you but also drill you on why you deserved that, mill you for arguing with him, and fasten the blame on someone else.

PhD or always honest MBAs?

[Phoeniyx]

I dunno about you. But, "in general", I have a tendency to believe a single PhD candidate over 5 MBAs. The more MBAs there are, even less I believe that group.

Well, the prize *is* for "business ethics"

[Eternal Vigilance]

"The mandate of the competition," Dzamba notes, "is to instill business ethics among college and university students..."

Hmm, steal the winning idea, take the prize money, threaten to sue the original inventor...I'd say the competition succeeded.