Prizes are popular with congress
Burstein & Murray, 16 --- * Burstein is an Associate Professor of Law at Cardozo School of Law. Murray is the Associate Dean for Innovation and William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management (SPRING 2016, Michael J. Burstein and Fiona E. Murray, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Volume 29, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2741827, AS)
These private sector efforts served as models for a new generation of government-sponsored innovation prizes. The Obama administration made prizes a key part of its National Strategy for American Innovation in 2009, and Congress responded in 2010 when it passed the COMPETES Act. The statute grants all federal agencies the authority “to award prizes competitively to stimulate innovation that has the potential to advance the mission of the respective agency.” Federal agencies as diverse as the Department of Energy, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Department of Transportation have offered at least one hundred prize competitions under the authority of the COMPETES Act. Nine of the COMPETES Act challenges in fiscal year 2014 had prize purses worth more than $100,000. Government-sponsored innovation prizes appear to be gaining popularity among lawmakers: As of this writing, the House of Representatives has passed a bill which would expand the use of prizes even further by creating a dedicated biomedical prize innovation fund for the National Institutes of Health.