There is an interesting article/opinion piece in the NY Times today that reviews the role of prizes in the development of science and technology. Today, many prizes are "retrospective" like the Noble Prize which provides a reward for past work. According to this article, prizes for solutions to problems (prospective prizes) were a common means for getting a solution to a problem in the 19th century and earlier. These prizes decreased as companies started up their own research laboratories (e.g., Bell Labs) but there is now new interest in reviving the practice. Consider the following quotes:
|Winners tend not to be the people you expect. The principal |scientific adviser to the Board of Longitude — someone to be |reckoned with, as it was Isaac Newton — had said that the only |solutions possible for the longitude problem would come from |astronomy. No one thought the answer would be found in a |new kind of clock. If the British had spent money on grants |to the usual suspects, it would have been wasted. The |conventional wisdom is that if you want to solve a molecular |biology problem you ask only molecular biologists. Big mistake. and |At Harvard Business School, Lakhani led a study of hundreds |of scientific problems posted on InnoCentive. These were |problems that the laboratories of science-driven companies |had mostly failed to solve, which is why they turned to InnoCentive. |They found that InnoCentive’s network solved nearly 30 percent of them. | |What made for success? InnoCentive asks solvers to check |boxes indicating the different scientific fields that interest them. |The more diverse the interests of the base of solvers, the more |likely the problem was to be solved. The study also found that |expertise in the field of the problem actually hurt a solver’s chances. |“The further the problem from the solver’s expertise, the more |likely they are to solve it,” Lakhini and his co-authors concluded. |If the problem fell completely outside a solver’s expertise, that |raised his or her chance of success by 10 percent. In addition |to being a technical outsider, being a social outsider also |helped — women did significantly better than men, perhaps |because they tended to be more marginalized in the scientific |community. Alph Bingham, one of InnoCentive’s founders, told |McKinsey that “you wouldn’t hire” a significant percentage of |successful solvers based on their credentials. The article is available here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/prizes-with-an-eye-toward-the-future/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1 And a link to the InnoCentive is here: http://www.innocentive.com/ So, who's interested in solving the problem of weighing a live animal? -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=16369 or send a blank email to leave-16369-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
