Their solvency take-outs simply reflect that prizes aren’t used enough, not that they fail

This paper discusses the use of incentive prizes to drive creativity, innovations and breakthroughs. Incentive prizes offer a large reward upon completion of a specific objective task. Traditionally they are large cash purses awarded to individuals or teams who build and demonstrate a new system (typically technology based) or accomplish a first time feat.

It is my belief that such prospective prizes that reward innovators for achieving a specific measurable goal have profound economic and psychological levers for accelerating and enabling innovation in areas that might otherwise be stuck for a number of reasons.

While prizes are not a panacea for driving innovation, they do provide an enormous amount of leverage and should be part of every organizations innovation tool box. Unfortunately, prizes are being vastly underutilized at this time. My personal objective is to encourage the notion that 10% of all philanthropic giving and 10% of all research grants should be in the form of incentive prizes which will result in additional capital and talent entering into the innovation marketplace.