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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.
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.
< crickets chirping >
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
These are MBA students.
They're going to end up owing some lawyers 1.2million.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
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.
Who's side do you come down on with Zuckerberg & Winklevoss twins?
Patent trolls? Lodsys going after the small developers after already having Apple pay for in-app license?
I did an MBA a couple of years ago.
It included a course on "ethics" which really did nothing other than help you self justify any action you took as being ok and easy on your conscious.
I still write software, independently now. I did the MBA to learn how "they" think.
As a lawyer once told me there's no such thing as "justice", only law which isn't the same thing.
Moral of this story is get a contract signed before you go sharing, especially from MBA types.
At the end of the day it's about execution, not the idea.
I come down on Zuckerberg's side.
I think patents should be abolished.
and nobody was at all suspicious? Right!
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
'one of the planet's leading forces for good.'
a million dollars
You know, If I were a supernatural evil being dedicated to the complete overthrow of the human race, one of the cleverer ideas my minions might have come up with would be to go around looking for 'Good' people and giving each of them a lot of money.
It's the most effective method I know of bringing out the worst in everybody.....
Their strongest arguments against including him are based on the idea that he has developed technology but that the Hult prize was for a business plan.
Note however that Jakub Dzamba won 3rd prize in McGill University’s Dobson Cup Business Plan Competition in 2012: Dobson Competition
The 2013 Hult prize winners from McGill University, according to Jakub, asked him to help on their entry and offered to get him listed as a team member or make him a partner in any business they started. It sounds like Jakub gave them substantial assistance if not the impetus for their entry.
Hult Competition is not innocent:
According to Jakub they reneged on their promises once it became apparent that the Hult competition would not let them add a 6th member.
University complicit:
According to the Huffington Post article the University Administration tried to get him to sign a gag order as part of a larger agreement.
Also note that it was at this point that: "McGill would file a pending patent for the cricket farms Dzamba designed in his name alone." which was used as an argument against him by one of the team members:
"McGill University, which values academic integrity and owns the patent, states unequivocally that our business has zero to do with Jakub," team member Jesse Pearlstein fired back.
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.
Get a nerd to do all the work, greedheads reap all the rewards. Same stuff he'd be facing on the job market.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
d.
The headline starts with the words "Cricket Reactor" but there doesn't seem to be any mention in the summary of the comments of crickets, or reactors
This is Slashdot so I didn't read RTFA
I am guessing that Cricket refers to the insect rather than the sport played by India, Pakistan, The West Indies, Australia, England, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.
This is the kind of management you'll be facing when you get out in the real world. There are herds of guys with this mentality being churned out by US business programs. They think that their "vision, drive, and leadership" is more important than your ideas and hard work. Don't be modest. If you come up with a great idea make sure everyone knows it was YOU and and not some 20-ish up-and-coming bureaucrat who will invariably take credit for it when you're not around or voicing a contrary opinion (I know from experience!).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The dispute will not prevent the McGill team from competing for the Hult Prize. While the origins of the cricket farm device are in dispute, Michael Lu, a vice president at Hult International Business School, which sponsors the competition, says the judges focus more on the business model than the device itself. Hult organizers believe “the designs provided are not central to the McGill team’s business idea and therefore did not contribute to them either winning the Boston regional round or their prospects of winning the $1 million prize,” Lu says.
Translation: Screw the guy who made things happen, this is a prize designed to reword the assholes who are best at stealing.
I am very interested to learn how would the so called "business model" work without the actual invention? Is it something like we collect the investors money, split them between ourselves and go play some golf.
The MBA students did not invent, they used his work with his permission to develop a business plan. They was a disagreement between the PHD student/inventor and the MBA students/business people and the MBA members booted him from the team. Unfortunately they forgot that his work is central to their efforts to secure further funding .... in other words they screwed him over just after the regional win and their actions have now screwed themselves over after the international win.
MBA won a minor battle but lost the war.
"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.